Tech experts suggest that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to replace thousands of his workers with artificial intelligence as the software is quicker, more accurate, and, crucially, doesn't cost as much.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced plans to cut another 10,000 staff from its workforce, the second round of mass-redundancies for the company in less than six months following 11,000 jobs being cut in November.
Mark Zuckerberg said the cuts were part of his "year of efficiency", which, according to industry experts, is cryptic for the deployment of Artificial Intelligence. In tests the software repeatedly outperformed Meta's human staff leading Zuckerberg to conclude that he could dispense with most of his workforce and replace them with the more efficient and cost effective computer programmes.
Zuckerberg fell short of telling the employees he is replacing them with Artificial Intelligence claiming higher interest rates, global geopolitical instability, and increased regulation as the reasons for the job cuts fearing a backlash if he were to tell the truth. Some of those to go are employees who have worked on the very AI programme that will replace them.
In a separate statement Zuckerberg boasted: “Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” adding that the new AI tools will be used to increase efficiencies internally by helping “engineers write better code faster.”
Meta have been developing AI for some years but the remarks come amid a heightened AI frenzy in the tech world, kicked off in late November when OpenAI released ChatGPT. The technology quickly went viral for its ability to generate compelling, human-sounding responses to user prompts and then kicked off an apparent AI arms race among tech companies. Google, Facebook and Amazon are all deploying AI this year, and have all announced mass job losses prior to their launch.
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