Jonathan Vanian at CNBC, confirming a Bloomberg report:

Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, as it continues ramping up investments in artificial intelligence.

The cuts will begin May 20, and the company is scrapping plans to hire people for 6,000 open roles, according to a Thursday memo to employees. […]

Meta’s latest round of cuts follows several smaller job reductions that the company said was necessary to improve efficiency while focusing its efforts on generative AI, where it’s lagged OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

Affected employees get “16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of employment.” For a recent hire—someone who may have only recently upended their life to work at Meta—that’s about four months to find a new job before their lease is up for renewal. Someone with five years at the company, who has established roots, perhaps with a kid just entering first grade, gets six months to restabilize their life. A Meta veteran of 18 years—I’m guessing there are very few of those—will have a year to determine if they still have a viable career in technology. If they’re under 50, they have a shot. If they’re not, well, good luck, I hope you’ve invested well.

All of this upheaval because Mark Zuckerberg chases technological fantasies with the attention span of a gerbil.

I have every confidence that he’ll be as successful with his AI machinations as he was with virtual reality.

Good news for the remaining employees, though: as a reward, they’ll be surveilled to train Meta’s AI, reports Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz at Reuters, presumably so Meta can eventually lay them off, too:

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.

The tool, called Model Capability Initiative (MCI), will run on work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens, according to one of the memos, posted by a staff AI research scientist on Tuesday in a channel for the company’s model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs team.

The purpose, according to the memo, was to improve the company’s AI models in areas where they struggle to replicate how humans interact with computers, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts.

Perhaps the thousands of people losing their jobs are the lucky ones.

Why spy on only U.S.-based employees?

In some countries, such as Italy, using electronic monitoring to track employee productivity is explicitly illegal, while in Germany, courts have held that employers can deploy keystroke logging only in exceptional circumstances, such as suspicion of a serious criminal offense.

Additionally, [York University law professor Valerio] De Stefano said, the practice would likely be considered a violation of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

As annoying as those GDPR-inspired cookie banners are, I’d welcome the privacy safeguards that law enables.

Many of the lucky American employees reacted negatively, with the top-rated comment on their internal chat system, according to Charles Rollet at Business Insider, being “This makes me super uncomfortable. How do we opt out?”

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth responded in the thread that “there is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop.” This comment received a mix of crying, shocked, and angry-face emojis.

Meta’s entire business is predicated on tracking vast amounts of data about its users—sometimes surreptitiously—so it’s perplexing that any employee would react negatively when Meta decides to collect vast amounts of data about them. Or to put it more blithely:

“I never thought leopards would surveil me,” sobs woman working for the Leopards Surveilling People Company.