Meta Tells Workers to ‘Go 5x Faster’ with AI

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to inner worlds, both online and IRL. Well, 404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Getting access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Yo. And Jason Kebler. Hey, what's up? So first of all, we are launching a new project, Jason. Do you briefly just want to explain what that is about book bands, that sort of thing?

0:48Yeah, so it's very early days, but we've partnered with our friends at Mockrock, who is this nonprofit that helps us file FOIAs and helps other people file FOIAs, so public records requests. And we're going to do a project where we are going to file a lot of FOIAs about book bans and educational censorship and curriculum changes and things of that nature, which has been something that we and many, many other people who you will be hearing from as we do this project have been fighting against since really like 2017, 2018 during Trump's first term. But we're going to hopefully be documenting a bit about how this movement started from trying to get teachers fired, trying to get libraries defunded, to taking over school boards, to then creating political power on the right through things like CRT, railing against drag story time, things like this.

1:57this political movement has gotten very, very powerful. And again, lots of people have been reporting on this for quite some time, but we've wanted to do a project about this for a while. And so we were talking to Muck Rock and we're getting going on it. We bring it up because this is going to be a long-term project. So if you are a school board member, if you are a librarian, if you are a concerned parent, if you know something going on in your community, please tell us. Already, I think maybe 100 people have reached out to say, this is happening in my town, this is happening at my school, this is happening at my library.

2:42We also have done a lot of our own research about where to file FOIAs and that sort of thing. But if you have any ideas, let us know. And if you have already reached out to me, we've gotten about 100 people who've reached out and we're going through that. I'll get back to you soon. But it's a very exciting time because we're going to be working with Claire Woodcock, who has written for us before, used to write for us at Motherboard and has been following this topic for a really long time. So you'll start to see stories about that probably in the next month or so. The other quick bit of housekeeping is we have restocked our merch store.

3:16We have We have new designs. We have this sweatshirt is back in stock. Beanies are back in stock. New t-shirt, things like this. So go check it out. They're going to be arriving in probably the next week. And it is far easier for me if you order now because I ship them all at once. So if you want that, go check out our Shopify page. You can find it at 404media.co and then click merch or store. I forget which one it is, but you'll find it. I think it's merch. yeah um and i also googled 404 media shop and it was the first result so that's what i do that's how i find it so you peek behind the curtain there yeah um all right let's move to this week's stories this first one is one that you wrote jason the headline is meta tells workers building metaverse to use ai to go 5x faster so the metaverse it still exists uh yeah allegedly allegedly it's still exists um there's actually been like i haven't spent time in horizon worlds or any of the other virtual reality product uh products of meta for quite some time sam i feel like you are always checking it out like have you been you've been in the metaverse lately have you have you strapped in i the metaverse always was always is always will be that's that's the state of the metaverse i mean i haven't been in horizon worlds in a minute either so i'm also shocked to hear that i thought they laid off everybody was working on it and like decided it was a bad idea but i guess they did not well they have spent tens of billions of dollars on it um which is perhaps part of why this is uh this message is coming now uh but the you know meta the company that renamed itself because of the metaverse but formerly known as facebook and now currently just obsessed with ai like every other tech company uh has decided to pay a little bit of attention to uh its metaverse employees through the lens of use ai to to go a lot faster to become more efficient to do your job more and better and who who wrote this message then this is not coming from Zuckerberg.

5:35It's coming from somebody else, right? No, it's coming from Vishal Shah, who is the head of... Well, they're VP of Metaverse. So basically he's in charge of Metaverse development at the moment. I saw I did an interview with The Verge last week and it was fine. But I also tried to figure out what was going on with the Metaverse. It was an interview with him nominally about developments in the Metaverse and it was so vague that I could not tell what the current state of the metaverse is. I have obviously talked to employees in metaverse development and just like on that team, which is called Reality Labs.

6:15And so Reality Labs also encompasses the smart glasses that we've talked about a lot. So that is kind of like the shiny product in that world at the moment is the smart glasses. But anyways, Vishal Shah went on to an internal message board, which looks just like Facebook. It's essentially like a Facebook group of four Facebook employees. And the title is Metaverse AI for P, which doesn't sound like it sounds like anything, but AI for P is AI for productivity. So the message says, Metaverse AI for P, think 5x, not 5%. Our goal is simple yet audacious. Make AI a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone so that using AI becomes second nature, just like any other tool we rely on.

7:08It also means integrating AI into every major code base and workflow. And then he goes on to say, I want to see us go 5x faster by limiting the frictions that slow us down and 5x faster to get to how our products feel much more quickly. Imagine a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea and feedback loops are measured in hours, not weeks. That's the future we're building.

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11:02So you see this message. and obviously you read this and then maybe you see some reactions from measure employees or not and we'll get to that. But what's your immediate reaction to seeing that message asking for 5x productivity? Yeah, so I mean, weirdly, I'm not surprised at all. And I got a comment from Facebook or from Meta on this and they were like, I don't know why anyone would be surprised about this. Like this is what we've been talking about for quite some time. and that's true. Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about trying to deploy coding agents all throughout Meta, the company. So basically using AI to write code, not just to help developers and programmers write code, but to just deploy them and have them write and push the code themselves, presumably after some sort of human review, although maybe not always.

11:59And so this is the future that Meta has been pushing for It's the future that a lot of Silicon Valley companies and startups have been pushing for. But I think the reason that it's very noteworthy is that it shows the level of, I guess, delusion that we're under. It shows a lot about how Meta thinks about its employees and how it thinks about its future. It's like, right now is a very difficult job market for computer programmers and computer scientists, in part because a lot of Silicon Valley companies are not hiring because they think, oh, we'll just offload this work to AI. And this shows that meta isn't like, oh, we can get a little bit more productivity from some of our employees if we leverage AI in a careful, thoughtful way.

12:50It's like, no, do five times the amount of work that you're doing right now. So, I mean, think about that. It's like, do five days worth of work in one day. So I guess all of them are going to be working Mondays and not any other day of the week and everyone will be happy and healthy and that's how this is going to work. But even if Meta deploys all of these coding agents in various parts of those companies, or just in the metaverse, to keep it to this example, how can you possibly 5x a person's output? And of course, it's not even just coding as well. There's going to be decisions have to be made inside meetings from human to human, just like it seems less moonshot, more delusional.

13:35Yeah, I mean, the message sort of goes on to say, we have all these internal guides about how you can use AI and what you can use it for. I don't have access to those guides. They're also doing some events and webinars where they're like, here, use our coding agents, use our AI tools to become more efficient, blah, blah, blah. But I think this really just shows AI as being a tool to replace human labor, even if it is not doing as good of a job as humans are doing. And that it's not like, oh, maybe we will just close some job openings and we'll slow down hiring. And maybe if we do layoffs, we won't replace people.

14:21It's like, no, the future that they want is they want each human to be five times more efficient, to do five times more work. And I don't think that they're going to get there. A lot of companies that have tried, have replaced workers with AI have found that they actually need to hire human workers back. A lot of studies have been done where it shows AI can be helpful around the edges for specific tasks. But in many cases, it actually slows down work because you have to do a lot of quality control and fixing the fuck-ups and hallucinations and things like that. but like this is this is like the job market that meta is like hoping and imagining is one where for every human they're getting five times the amount of work that they used to get and you know you can do the math from there like this portends layoffs it portends like you know hiring freezes so on and so forth and i i think that is why it was notable and that's why i wanted to write about it is because it sort of shows how this like massively important company that I think still employs probably more than 100 ,000 people worldwide is thinking about AI and is looking at human labor.

15:44Yeah, even if you personally don't use a ton of meta products, or maybe you just use Instagram, you definitely don't use Facebook or whatever. They're still a huge company, and they're still doing an absolute ton of stuff. So, you know, decisions like these are going to impact a bunch of people's lives and then the users of the products as well. And even those who may not even be on Facebook, you've still seen Facebook's AI slop, even if you're not on Facebook. So did you see any of the responses from MetaWorkers about this or get a vibe of that or not really? I did. I did. I think the team, like Meta is a huge company.

16:29There's a lot of people working on the metaverse. It's, it was tricky in this case to include worker feedback because there's only so many people who like would have seen this message and kind of like sharing different things would have made it easier to figure out like basically like when a specific worker saw this or whatever. So in that case, I didn't include much in the article, but vibes are low. The vibes are not good on the metaverse team in particular. I think that they feel a little bit like an afterthought at this point after so much money was poured into it. I think that Zuckerberg has shown himself to be interested in chasing whatever shiny new thing there is.

17:14in this case, it's AI and it's like, I don't know, they cloned CapCut, for example. It's like, I feel like Meta in general is like constantly releasing products that are similar to other products that already exist. And then they're like, wow, here's our new thing. And then they move on from it like really quickly. Like, I don't know if you guys remember, but they launched, I was scrolling through my phone and they launched an app called Edits, which is literally a CapCut clone. And they did that. They should never have heard of it. And they did that because CapCut and TikTok got banned for a moment for like literally 24 hours.

17:46And that's like when it came out. And they're like, oh, we are going to compete with CapCut. And I opened it the other day and it sucks. It's like it's clearly like kind of being abandoned more or less. I mean, surely there's people still working on it. But I think that's how people working on the metaverse feel where it's like shiny new toys. Zuckerberg moves on and then they're sort of still toiling away. And then also, of course, being asked to do 5X work. They're just like, fuck this. Yeah. And then at the same time, Mark Zuckerberg is going with Palmer Luckey and announcing a new AR headset or whatever for the US American war fighter.

18:28And the poor people working on the metaverse are just like, well, do we have legs or not to these avatars? It's like, it must suck. Well, there's that. And I think also there is honestly a sense... I'm extrapolating out a little bit, but based on the workers I've talked to and the stuff that I've seen, it's like there was this idea that they were going to build the metaverse and it was going to be a place where you go surfing. Zuckerberg is always showing surf demos and concerts where you could buy little outfits for your avatar and ad legs and all of this sort of thing, like these developments.

19:09And what it turns out that the company is interested in the metaverse for at the moment is, as you mentioned, military industrial complex applications. And so there is the like, oh, we thought we were doing this to connect people and to, for peaceful purposes, for lack of a better term. And now it's like, well, the cops are using the smart glasses Ice is using the smart glasses, and also we're partnering with Palmer Lucky. It's not a good vibe. Yeah, that makes sense. And then I think just lastly, and you touched on this with some of the startups and stuff as well, but what context is this message from Meta landing in?

19:53As in, other companies are basically doing the same thing. They haven't said 5x specifically necessarily, but Amazon is mentioned in the piece as well, right? Yeah. So there's actually been a handful of companies that have been messages, emails from CEOs and messages from CEOs being like, I use ChatGPT and it wrote an email for me and it took notes at a meeting for me. And therefore, I expect everyone to use AI. And therefore, I expect you all to be a lot more productive. and these messages have leaked like from time to time and it's very funny because almost all of them have come from like quite small startups where they're just like you know you can kind of like roll your eyes and be like oh this person doesn't really know what they're talking about or like this ceo just found out about chat gpt for the first time ever and in this case it's like no it's like it's meta it's like one of the five largest companies on planet earth and that's and they're telling their employees to do the same thing.

20:57And then similarly, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said something quite similar earlier this year, where they said that they, quote, expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. And so again, yeah, most companies that are using this are sort of doing it in the name of increased productivity, but also like, and because of that increased productivity, some of you will not have jobs. Great. Yeah. And I mean, I don't, it's very hard to even tell sort of like the impact of AI on the job market at the moment because the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and things like that, like are not releasing jobs reports.

21:47One, because when there was a bad one, Trump got very mad and fired the people who did it and then replaced them. But beyond that, the government is shut down now. So there's not even like the kind of, I mean, I'll say it, but like sham numbers or the numbers that are like, you know, approved by the admin for release. And so it's kind of hard to say what the job market is doing right now. but like private estimates of how the job market is doing. There's been like a few bank reports and like, you know, like consulting firms have done reports and they're like, it's extremely bad. Like very few places are hiring.

22:30A lot of places are doing layoffs. And most growth that we're seeing is in like, I could be wrong, but I think it's like nursing and AI and it's like data center building and it's like healthcare. and that's pretty much it. And the entire rest of the economy is very stagnant at the moment. So not good, not good. No, not good at all. All right, let's leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about this really catastrophic Discord hack. We'll be right back after this.

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26:01Okay, we're back. Going to talk to both Sam and Joe about this. the title is the discord hack is every user's worst nightmare um i feel like about a week ago there was kind of like news about a discord hack but there was not a lot of details on what was happening who was hacked what was hacked how how like the like i don't know there's just like news about it but then there wasn't a lot of details about what was in it so what was in this breach like what was the hack what's the general background of what happened yeah because i remember sam actually saw something about this breach before we covered it and yeah there were rumblings about it on twitter from various infosec accounts i think maybe matthew our regular contributor saw something as well but to peel back with curtain a little bit it's kind of hard you can't just write a story like you have to find a way in basically and it's like oh people saying there might be a discord breach it's like that's not that's not really an article um fortunate for us very unfortunate for the the victims of the breach and of course discord as well the hackers did start to publish some of this data that was related to discord users and i mean it's really really sensitive stuff there are selfies in there um people's identity documents and often those are the same photo because of course you have to take a photo of your face and hold up your id so discord can see or the third-party service or whoever can see yes that's the same person and yes they're of a certain age or whatever but there's also users email addresses in there and their phone numbers and sometimes this is linked to their customer support tickets so like it's a bunch of really sensitive discord user information i mean we'll get into it it's not a breach of discord it's not like discord itself was hacked it was a third-party provider but all of the data is discord related so i'm just calling it discord breach and i think that's totally fair but yeah this is like really really scary bad stuff that's so much worse than like I don't know, a username and password.

28:19This is more sensitive. Yeah. Is the company that was hacked, in this case, the company specifically dealing with age verification for Discord, or was it more than just that? So Discord has been a little bit flippy-floppy on this information. they say that the ids taken were related to its age-related appeals. As we'll get into, that's not necessarily the same as age verification, which Sam could talk about a lot, but it still shows it's basically the same risk, right? Got it. Yeah. And then, and I didn't put this in the article because it came out maybe a day or two later, but Discord did tell me that the third-party service provider was a company called 5CA, which I'd never heard of before.

29:17But they were the ones that were actually hacked, yeah. Yeah, okay. So hold that there. We'll get back into that in a moment. So tell me a little bit about how this information came out. You sort of watched the data coming out more or less in real time, right? Yeah, so Discord was being extorted for a while. As we said, rumblings of this breach had happened and were going around. I then got a link to this Telegram channel where the Discord hackers were taunting Discord, taunting, I think, Zendesk as well, which is, you know, a piece of software and a platform that apparently this third party probably used.

30:07and they were very annoyed because apparently discord was not playing ball with this extortion attempt as you know readers will know and you've probably seen because there's a million reports on it reports on it now is so so common today for hackers to break into a company steal the data and they won't just send like a private extortion demand they will do this like spectacle and they may even send information to journalists. They may send a very well choreographed orchestrated email laying out to journalists, hey, here's what we have, blah, blah, blah. Or they may post it to Twitter. That doesn't happen so much now because Twitter's changed its policies.

30:51And in this case, they were posting stuff to Telegram. So I join the channel. The hackers, as I said, are annoyed. and then they just start posting some of this user data now we only included heavily redacted copies in the article itself like we basically blurred out the entire face hair eyes hand username id of some of these people and they were very very small snippets it was just like a handful of photos of you know what looks like a young person uh or they are definitely young people holding their ids but then there were screenshots of what the hackers were presenting as much more stolen data and i was just sat there in real time i just joined the uh the group and this very steady stream of data just keeps getting posted to the channel it was kind of a unfortunate matter of being you know in the right place at the right time and you know this is just the way that some of these hackers do it nowadays.

31:57Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I want to pivot to the age verification slash age appeals situation, like part of this, because Sam, you have been writing for a year, two years at this point about age verification laws and about sort of like what happens when users are required to provide an ID to access different web services. And in most cases, it seems like a lot of companies are outsourcing this work, like they're having a third party company do this sort of thing. So age verification law or not, like there are selfies of people holding up government IDs and their face. And that's like what was in this breach.

32:48This seems like the nightmare that you have been writing about from a theoretical perspective for a while, but now it has happened. Yeah, I mean, this is what everyone's been warning about who's been talking about age verification and the risks that go along with it. I was just looking it up because I was like, has it only been a year? And Louisiana passed their age verification law And they were the first one in the States to really enact one of these laws in 2022. So it's been three years now of two and a half, three years of talking about the risks involved in these laws. And now I think we're finally seeing it happen in real life.