Of course Daniel McKinnon could have guessed that it would catch up with him eventually. Of course the 40-year-old could have anticipated what he had actually been doing the whole time. "In a way, I was programming the end of my own career,” he says as he walks along the pier at the San Francisco harbor.
The engineer had spent years developing artificial intelligence for the software company Meta. At first, Mark Zuckerberg's company used such code to improve the speech recognition of its in-house AI model, Llama. Then, to make Meta's Ray-Ban glasses "smart" and its own AI chips more efficient. Now, though, it is being used to replace human labor on a massive scale.
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In mid-May, Zuckerberg fired 10 percent of his workforce, dismissing around 8,000 employees – people like McKinnon, who had given everything for years to the success of Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, only to find an email in their inbox early one morning. As of immediately, it read, their labor was no longer needed. Anyone not yet in the office should not even bother driving in, as their access cards had been deactivated. He wanted, according to Zuckerberg's justification, to "run the company more efficiently" and needed to offset major investments, above all those in superintelligent software. Meta wants to become "AI-native" – a company that bets it all on AI.