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I am to speculate that they are going to use this as an excuse to let people go without doing mass layoffs and having to pay severance. Training AI is just an excuse.
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Many many moons ago I refused to implement a calendar event scraping system at Meta where it would look at all of your meetings on the calendar and do "analysis". IDK what ever happened to that task, I assume it died a death of no one else being willing to do it. This was probably 2011 or so, I can only imagine it has gotten so much worse.
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It's pretty easy to scrape your own calendar events in Meta. I'm not sure about others' as I'm not a manager, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were visible as long as someone is in your report chain.

(I work at Meta)

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White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance. It’s a cheap way to get employees to sign some stuff reducing the risk of lawsuits, plus their unemployment insurance premiums stay lower.

It’s only once the business is having a cash crunch or will no longer need to hire competitive candidates that they start letting people go without severance.

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> White collar firms with a reputation for paying well don’t cheap out on severance

Tell that to Elon Musk and Twitter employees.

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Musk saddled that company with an additional billion in debt interest payments every year so they were in a cash crunch.
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Oh is that the excuse why the billionaire couldn't afford to pay out pennies?
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> I like to imagine they’ll mostly capture meta employees using AIs to do work.

This will also give them data on which employees aren't using AI enough, and then they'll be PIP'd or let go.

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While it would be a hilarious failure mode to encounter, this is actually a good thing!

These models already have the skills that humans were using them for, so either by training the models to use subagents or simply inlining the work done by the AI, you have a much easier time training the model to perform tasks from a human-distribution. The humans have done the work of making the human-distribution look more like an AI distribution.

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Doesn't this assume that what humans are current doing with LLM agents is working out? Isn't it a bit early to bet on that to this degree?
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Not when all of the marketing of LLMs is touting their abilities to do the exact thing and that is what investors are being presented.

If it is as you say, then eventually the house of cards will crumble. Then we can finally go back to work and quit being inundated with needing to use AI for everything.

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Breaknews: Meta makes the ultimate AI version of "Cat sits on your keyboard" simulator
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