WIRED Roundup: Meta’s AI Brain Drain

0:00Leah Feiger:Hey, this is Zöe. Before we start, I want to share some exciting news with you. We're doing a live show in San Francisco on September 9th in partnership with KQED. Uncanny Valley co-hosts Lauren Good and Michael Colore will sit down with our editor-in-chief, Katie Drummond, and a special guest for a conversation that you won't want to miss. You can use the link in the show notes to grab your ticket and invite a friend. We can't wait to see you there. Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including our exclusive scoop on how at least three AI researchers recently recruited by Meta's superintelligence labs have already decided to jump ship.

0:44Leah Feiger:I'm joined today by our senior politics editor, Leah Figer. Leah, welcome. Hey, Zoe. Thanks for having me. so via our first story this week is about how ai is already starting to replace certain jobs and let me tell you when i read this study i instantly thought of you this is a study from stanford university that our colleague will knight reported on and the study found the strongest evidence yet that ai is starting to eliminate a slice of entry-level jobs particularly in customer service and software development. In those industries, they found a 16 % decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25.

1:24Zöe Roth:I think the thing that really got me about this study and from Will's excellent write-up is that the main thing that you do in these entry-level jobs is figure out how to be a real human and how to live in an adult world and how to respond to emails and show up places on time. I think we have to actually be a little bit more forward-thinking. We have to think about what does that then mean for people who would have become managers, would have become leaders in these different industries where these entry-level jobs are getting cut. We're losing a big pipeline, and that's what freaks me out the most.

1:55Zöe Roth:Do I care that menial tasks are being done by AI? Not hugely, but there's these intangibles of becoming a human straight out of undergrad that we're just going to miss now.

2:05Leah Feiger:I completely agree with you. These jobs are really about training you how to be a professional. And when you don't get that training, I mean, these companies still want more experienced workers and they want those people to be collaborating with artificial intelligence. But it's like, how do you get people to that point if the entry-level jobs are being eliminated?

2:23Zöe Roth:How do you get experience? How do you get experience?

2:27Leah Feiger:Staying with AI a little bit longer, Elon Musk's company XAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI earlier this week. And he's accusing them of behaving like monopolies and claiming Apple deprioritized ChatGPT rivals like Grok in the App Store. The lawsuit takes particular issue with Apple's integration of ChatGPT into the iOS operating system last year.

2:50Zöe Roth:I know this isn't the first time that Musk has sued OpenAI either. The thing that really gets me is these two men hate each other.

2:56Leah Feiger:This feud goes way back. Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI. And early on, they actually had this leadership fight where both Sam Altman and Elon thought that they should lead the company, which at the time was a nonprofit. Obviously, Sam Altman won that fight. And then in the aftermath, Elon Musk eventually sued OpenAI saying, hey, you've abandoned your founding mission because at a certain point, they started a for-profit subsidiary. Is that actually serious? Is like having a second spot, does that actually detract consumers? It is a big deal. I mean, if you look for a productivity app and you see ChatGPT first and Grok second, you are more likely to download chat GBT.

3:37Leah Feiger:But I think the argument that you'll definitely hear from OpenAI, but even reasonable third-party observers will say, that's not evidence necessarily of Apple colluding with OpenAI. It might just be a more popular app. Moving on to our next story, Wired contributor Taylor Lorenz reported about a mysterious group that seems to be funding Democratic influencers. These people are just like regular influencers, except they post about liberal politics. Taylor learned that back in June, a group of them received an offer to get as much as$8 ,000 per month to take part in a program aimed to bolster Democratic messaging via their accounts.

4:12Leah Feiger:The offer came from Chorus, the nonprofit arm of the 1630 Fund. And the offer came with a lot of strings attached. Influencers were not allowed to tell anyone about their involvement in the program. They had really strict restrictions on what type of content they could post. What did you think when you heard this?

4:30Zöe Roth:I thought two things. One, we got to publish this story. Two, our readers are going to kill us. Republicans have done something similar to this for a very long time. Paying influencers and doing your very best to not disclose any part of it is not new to the political process. A lot of folks in 2024 were like, Democrats need to be going harder. They need to be doing so much better with their social media, with their influencers, with whomever. And at Wired, we went really hard on that too. And watching the Harris campaign and before that, the Biden campaign put out very canned content. They were playing by the old rules.

5:07Zöe Roth:And that's just not how the internet works anymore. And so while the Republicans are paying their influencers, it's happening in different ways. And it's happening under a much larger tent. The thing that's been incredible about watching the Republican social media strategy is that you have influencers who pick fights with Trump. You have influencers who pick fights with different campaigns, with J.D. Vance, with whomever. but they're still underneath this tent and they're still able to coalesce, whereas the Democrats have kept their tent so much tighter. So I'm not going to weigh in one way or the other what necessarily I believe the Democrats should be doing, but this has not won them campaigns in the past, this level of control, and I'm eager to see if anyone thinks it will going forward.

5:49Zöe Roth:And to be very clear, the DNC is not implicated here. This is a specific group. This is not Democrats as a whole. They are Democrats, but they are not the Democrats.

5:58Leah Feiger:One more story before we go to break. And this one, stay with me. It's morbid as hell. It's by Wired contributor Jess Thompson, who recently reported on what are known as body farms. These sites are basically what they sound like. They're for forensic scientists to study how the human body decomposes. Obviously, all the bodies are donated. And by observing how fast cadavers break down in a controlled setting, investigators can learn about the decomposition and better pinpoint exactly what happened to dead bodies that are found out in the real world. They give classes to law enforcement and fire investigator partners based on their findings.

6:36Leah Feiger:There are only a handful of body farms in existence and most are in the U.S. And the people running these facilities, interestingly, are mostly women.

6:44Zöe Roth:Yes. So many thoughts.

6:46Leah Feiger:I have so many thoughts. I know. I mean, the article is like, it's like a horror movie. And it's like an outdoor space where bodies are just laid out and you're watching them decompose. It's a little scary.

6:59Zöe Roth:Don't forget the netting that's around them to keep scavengers away. But also to be said, there is something kind of beautiful in a part of the article. These bodies are donated. It's literally to help law enforcement in the future figure out body decomposition when it comes to violent crimes.

7:16Leah Feiger:And they do say right at the beginning, the thing in cop shows where they're like, the body's been here for three days. They were like, that's not real.

7:24Zöe Roth:I loved that. Anything that tells me that Law & Order SVU is not in fact accurate is good by me. We need that. We definitely need that.

7:34Leah Feiger:Coming up after the break, we dive into how some recently recruited AI researchers at Meta's superintelligence labs are already packing their bags and leaving. Stay with us.

7:50Zöe Roth:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

8:28Leah Feiger:Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. Here with me is our senior politics editor, Leah Figer. So our main story this week, our colleague Will Knight and I recently learned that at least three people who were recruited to Meta's super intelligence labs have already resigned just two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the initiative. But this is the kicker. Two of the staffers have recently returned to OpenAI where they previously worked, and they had less than one month stints at Meta. That's wild. Meta obviously felt some type of way about the reporting. Did you get yelled at?

9:06Leah Feiger:I got yelled at. But, you know, I think their POV was, these people didn't last any length of time. What is this telling us? But in my mind, Mark Zuckerberg just went on this massive, multi-billion dollar recruiting spree. He's giving people pay packages, more often associated with professional sports stars. And the fact that some people are already leaving very, very shortly after starting, That is just such a bad sign, I think. It's not to say that this lab couldn't be successful or they couldn't turn things around, but it just seems like there's a lot of chaos right from the beginning.

9:43Zöe Roth:Well, you're being offered$100 million in a bonus. You get there. You don't even have time to bring in your favorite mug. I know there's incredible food at Meta. You can't even find your favorite cafeteria yet. A month is not enough time. What got them back to OpenAI, do you think?

9:59Leah Feiger:So this is something that I'm still trying to figure out because it didn't seem like from my reporting so far that Sam Altman just dangled an even bigger pay package. And Meta has deeper pockets. They can offer more money, which isn't to say that OpenAI isn't trying to compete on that front. But the whispers that I was hearing were more about mission alignment and leadership. You'll hear people say, well, Alexander Wang, who was the CEO of Scale AI, this very young founder, he's not technical is what people will allege. He's not a hardcore researcher. And he's now leading Meta Super Intelligence Labs.

10:35Leah Feiger:He was tapped really this summer to take on this really big role at Meta. But Sam Alton's not a super technical researcher either. But he really has almost what I would say is a cult of personality around him at OpenAI. And Mira Marati had this too. You know, Mira was the CTO, but she wasn't like Ilya. She wasn't a hardcore researcher in that way, but she was able to talk to researchers. They really felt understood by her. They trusted her. And so I think she too is able to get a lot of loyalty from the people she works with, even if she's, from what I hear, not paying the astronomical sums that meta might be.

11:12Zöe Roth:But those sums clearly aren't even enough. I was really trying to think about it. If someone offered me$100 million and I couldn't make it through the first month, what would have had to have happened?

11:24Leah Feiger:Yeah, I'm struggling because I love money.

11:27Zöe Roth:I'm really not sure. You've done such a good job of this as you've covered the AI talent wars throughout the summer of these cults of personality, but also you covered some messaging that Altman was sending the entire team earlier. It was so mission-driven. And on the meta side, it's really kind of felt like a cash grab. Yeah, that's such

11:45Leah Feiger:a good point. I think when you compare it to OpenAI and Anthropic, whether you believe what Sam or Dario are selling in terms of like, oh, AI is going to completely change the world. It's going to have these biomedical breakthroughs. It's going to create personalized medicine. It's going to do X, Y, Z. That is a very compelling mission if you buy into it even 20 or 30 percent versus on the meta side, we talked to people who went through the recruitment process with Mark Zuckerberg. And we're like, yeah, it's basically like AI slop for Instagram and Facebook. I mean, that's completely their interpretation.

12:22Leah Feiger:I'm 100 % sure if you talked to a meta executive, they would have a very alternate view. But it's personalized AI content for people, which entertainment, sure. But it's not the groundbreaking, world-changing initiative that these other companies are at least claiming.

12:37Zöe Roth:Yeah, it's the shiny bobble.

12:39Leah Feiger:Exactly. We have to get in on it because it's the bubble. It's the bubble. And honestly, it's worth saying it'll probably make Meta a lot of money. That will probably be successful from a business perspective.

12:53Zöe Roth:The economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift. And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.

13:22Leah Feiger:That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley, which is all about how unplugging, whether that's going off the grid or reducing your screen time, looks in 2025. of. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. Kande Nas, head of global audio, is Chris Bannon. And Katie Drummond is Wired's global editorial director.

13:57Zöe Roth:On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds.

14:02Leah Feiger:Asking really strong questions is a superpower.

14:06Zöe Roth:You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you get podcasts. Thank you.