Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t buy the fear about AI job displacement.
“I think that people assume that that’s inevitability,” Zuckerberg said during a recent live interview for Complex’s “Idea Generation.” “I don’t actually think it is.”
Zuckerberg said the job situation will improve if companies focused more on “personal super intelligence” versus on “automating all knowledge work,” a not so subtle plug for Meta’s AI vision and a veiled dig at some of the leading AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. The Meta CEO said a future where “a few companies” focus on automating knowledge work would be “not great.”
“If you have a balance where some companies are focused on making it so that companies can work more efficiently, but others are focused on more of this personal super intelligence vision where you’re like empowering individuals and making people more productive at each step along the way, then I think it’s probably going to be pretty good,” he said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been outspoken in discussing his view that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs could be wipe out in the next one to five years. Others, such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have suggested that their fears of a so-called job apocalypse has not come to pass.
Companies are always trying to find ways to get more efficient, Zuckerberg said. The goal is that workers stay ahead of the pace of automation.
“If you focus on empowering people and making people more productive and that happens at a faster rate than companies get better at automating things, then in theory there should be more jobs in the future, not less,” he said.
Despite being a much more established tech company, Meta has struggled in the AI race. Zuckerberg called the billions Meta has spent to poach talent and pivot its AI strategy “a reboot.” Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang, viewed as one of the top prizes in the AI talent war, led the recent release of Muse Spark, the first large language model Meta released since it invested $14 billion in Scale AI.
Asked if he was “happy” with Meta’s standing in the generative AI race, the famously competitive Zuckerberg suggested there was always more to be done. He pointed out that Meta’s SuperIntelligence Lab was less than a year old.
“If you told me that we’d be where we are today in terms of the model progress, I would’ve been very happy with that,” Zuckerberg said.”But because I have acclimated to the good news along the way, I now think that we should be doing even better.”
Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya recently offered a much more grim assessment of Meta’s standing in the generative AI race, saying that it was “pretty unlikely” the social networking giant could ever catch up.
“I don’t know the organization well enough, nor do I understand the political dynamics to understand why they failed as miserably as they have,” Palihapitiya, who now cohosts the popular “All-In Podcast,” told Axios’ Dan Primack. “But they’ve profoundly failed.”
Meta’s own headcount
As of April, Meta said that it had increased its overall headcount by 1% year-over-year to a total of 77,986, according to its latest 10-Q filing.
That filing was made before Meta laid off roughly 10% of its workforce in May. Business Insider previously reported that roughly 8,000 roles were eliminated, including jobs in Meta’s Integrity, cybersecurity, and content design teams.
In a memo announcing the cuts to employees, the company said the move was needed to allow for “our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.”
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