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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#11

Post by toasty228 »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

> As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy.

I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#12

Post by bachmeier »

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force.

> Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.

Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#14

Post by thih9 »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

One attempt was open source. Or perhaps libre software? I guess it is not a success since only one of these looks mainstream.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#15

Post by idle_zealot »

krackers wrote: post #7
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers…

I don't know what you're quoting, but I wish it were the case that something affecting a million people granted each affected individual about a one-millionth share in the decision. I don't think that would always yield good outcomes, but at least it would be democratic. Structures that enable that are what we should be building.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#16

Post by matusp »

ahartmetz wrote: post #6
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia.

LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#17

Post by Forgeties79 »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.”

We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be.

Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations?

I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center.

It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#18

Post by bananaflag »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket.

I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#19

Post by deanCommie »

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable.

Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)

The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.

For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.

2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.

Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.

And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.

How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?

I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#20

Post by krupan »

ahartmetz wrote: post #6
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

Very well said. Free software was a revolt against technology that you have no control over and I feel like the people that are whole heartedly embracing "AI" have completely forgotten this. They now use an incredibly expensive proprietary piece of technology that they have no control over to write a bunch of code that they cannot (even if they tried) understand and they talk like it's the most amazing thing ever. This is pure short-sighted foolishness.
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