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

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders Sam Cole

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 bans, that sort of thing?

Yeah, so it's very early days, but we've partnered with our friends at MuckRock, 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 like trying to get teachers fired, trying to get libraries defunded to taking over school boards to then sort of like creating political power on the right through things like CRT,

you know, railing against drag story time, things like this.

This 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, like, this is happening in my town, this is happening at my school, this is happening at my library.

We also, you know, 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 have 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.

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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 still exists?

Yeah, allegedly, allegedly, it still exists.

There's actually been, like, I haven't spent.

time in Horizon Worlds or any of the other virtual reality

products of meta for quite some time.

Sam, I feel like you are always checking it out.

Like, have you been in the metaverse lately?

Have you have you strapped in?

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 who 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, which is perhaps part of why this is this message is coming now.

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, has

decided to pay a little bit of attention to 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 wrote this message then?

It's not coming from Zuckerberg.

It'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, you know, it was fine.

But I also tried to figure out what was going on with the metaverse.

Like it was an interview with him nominally about like developments in the metaverse 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 in on that team, which is called Reality Labs.

And 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.

Like it's just a, it's essentially like a Facebook group of four Facebook employees.

And the title is Metaverse AI4P, which doesn't sound like it sounds like anything, but AI4P is AI for productivity.

So the message says, Metaverse AI 4P, 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.

It 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 eliminating 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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So

you see this message

and obviously you read this and then maybe you see some reactions from Mesha 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.

Like, Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about trying to deploy coding agents all throughout

Meta, the company.

So, basically, like using AI to write code, not just to help developers and programmers write code, but to just like deploy them and have them write and push the code themselves, presumably after some sort of human review, although maybe not always.

And so this is like 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 like very noteworthy is that it shows like the level of,

I guess, delusion that we're under.

Like it's, it shows the level,

shows a lot about like 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.

It'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 its 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the message sort of goes on to say, like, we have all these internal guides about how you can use AI and what you can use it for.

You know, I don't have access to those guides.

They're also doing some like events and webinars where they're like, here, use our coding agents, like, use our AI tools to become more efficient, blah, blah, blah.

But I think this really just shows like AI as being a tool to replace human labor, even if that,

even if it is not

like 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.

It'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,

you know, I don't think that they're going to get there.

Like, a lot of companies that have tried,

like, have replaced workers with AI, have found that they actually need to hire human workers back.

A lot of studies have sort of been done where it shows like 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,

you know, like 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 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.

Yeah, even if you personally don't use a ton of meta products, or maybe you just use Instagram and 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 meta workers about this or get a vibe of that?

Or

I did.

I did.

I think

the team, like Meta is a huge company.

There's a lot of people working on the metaverse.

It was tricky in this case to include worker feedback because there's only so many people who 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

like 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, you know, so much money was poured into it.

I think that,

you know, Zuckerberg has shown himself to be interested in chasing whatever shiny new thing there is.

In 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.

And they did that because CapCut and TikTok got banned for a moment for like literally 24 hours.

And 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 not, it's clearly like kind of

been 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 toy, 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 Lucky and announcing a new AR headset or whatever for the US-American warfighter.

And

the poor people working on the metaverse are just like well do we have legs or not to these avatars like it must suck well there's that and I think also there is honestly a sense um

I'm extrapolating out a little bit but based on like 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 like surfing like Zuckerberg is always showing like surf demos and like

uh

you know know

concerts where you could buy little

outfits for your avatar and add legs and all of this sort of thing like these developments.

And like what it turns out that the company is interested in the metaverse for at the moment is, as you mentioned, like military industrial complex applications.

And so there is

the like, oh, we thought we were doing this to like connect people and to,

you know, for like peaceful purposes, for lack of a better 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 like partnering with palmer lucky it's like not not good vibe yeah that makes sense and then i think just lastly what and you touched on this with some of the the startups and stuff as well but what what context is this message from meta landing in as in other companies are basically doing the same thing they haven't said 5x specifically necessarily but you know Amazon is mentioned in the piece as well, right?

Yeah.

So there's actually been like a handful of companies that

have been like

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 like 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 ChatGPT 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 what, and they're telling their employees to do the same thing.

And then similarly,

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said something like quite similar earlier this, I think it was 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 one because

uh 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, 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, a 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 like 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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Okay, we're back.

Gonna talk to both Sam and Joe about this.

The title is The Discord Hack is Every User's Worst Nightmare.

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 was 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 the curtain a little bit it's kind of hard you could 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 really an article.

Fortunate for us, very unfortunate for 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,

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 a 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, username and password.

This is like 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 that 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, maybe a day or two later, but Discord did tell me that the third-party service provider was a company called 5CA, which I had never heard of before.

But they were the ones that were actually hacked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So hold that there.

We'll get back into that in a moment.

But so tell me a little bit about like how this information came out.

Like you sort of watch 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.

And 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 now.

It 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 or orchestrated email laying out to journalists, hey, here's what we have, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Or they may post it to Twitter.

That doesn't happen so much now because Twitter's changed its policies.

And 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 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

group and

this very steady stream of data just keeps getting posted to the channel.

It was kind of an unfortunate matter of being in the right place at the right time.

And this is just the way that some of these hackers do it nowadays.

Yeah.

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.

This 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 reification 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 refrigeration 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.

It's no longer a hypothetical, oh, maybe

hackers will get access to this information.

It's like, okay, now it's become widespread enough, enough platforms have it

that

bad actors are savvy to how it works and know that there's basically a honeypot waiting on any of these platforms that have H3ACA in place.

And I think this is, I mean, it's pretty,

it's a pretty basic tenet of like online privacy and security: that the more places you have your stuff spread out there, the more of a risk it is to have your data breached or hacked or leaked or accessed by people you don't want it to.

And now you have to verify your age to get into certain Discord channels.

You have to verify your age to get into Pornhub in a lot of different states, or you can access Pornhub in a lot of states, period, because they know these are the risks.

But in the states that you do, you have to put your ID in.

There's

states where you have to do this for Blue Sky.

It's just, it's becoming more and more common to

hand over not just your ID, but also like take a selfie with your face.

Even like T, when we wrote about that hack, that was a pretty clear example of the way that

verification systems that rely on government ID and selfies and these kind of know your customer

systems that are these third-party systems are vulnerable to this sort of thing.

And I think it's

sad and it sucks in a couple ways.

I think one of the ways that I think

is the most striking to me is how this is going to erode people's trust in pretty much any kind of

security and privacy online in general.

I think already people are like, I don't give a shit.

Just tweet my social security number and it doesn't matter.

Like no no one cares anymore and now it's like you're facing a prompt that says we store your data safely we don't store your data we store it for three days whatever it is um we make sure that we handle that correctly and then two weeks later your selfie is on the internet because hackers have found it and you're holding up a picture of your id

it's like at what point do people just like not care anymore what what a platform says about their privacy practices and just say, give it to whoever.

I don't, it doesn't matter to me anymore.

Because I don't don't think the reaction is going to be, I'm going to lock down my OPSEC and be like, or like, I'm not going to use Discord, or I'm not going to use like all my friends are on Discord.

All the people I play video games with are on Discord.

I'm just going to not go on there.

It's like that, that's really not

that many people are going to just say, okay, I'm not going to use these services anymore.

Like a lot of people are just going to do what they're being told to do.

Yeah.

And we saw it with T.

It's like T got more popular after the hack because it was in the news more.

You know, it's like, I think, I think we're just in such a like a nihilistic zone with our privacy that

that is more worrisome to me, even than like your data being out there.

It's like the effect on the way we see our privacy is eroding.

Yeah.

I mean, one thing that

you touched on it, but it's like,

as a user, you cannot choose what third-party age verification service

like any of these platforms are going to use?

And so there's a lot of different ones.

Some of them say that, like, okay, we take your selfie,

we verify it, and then we like destroy it immediately, or we encrypt it, or we keep it for three days, then we get rid of it, or whatever.

And so you're kind of banking on the security of that third-party, you know, age verification service.

But if

not all, not all companies do that, and like it's very hard as a user to vet the security of any given service that does this.

And

as these laws get more and more onerous, and as they're in more and more places, and as the definition of what porn is gets bigger and bigger, or what adult content is gets bigger and bigger, or it's like

I feel like it's becoming very, very difficult to avoid this.

And so, yeah, maybe like one service does take privacy seriously, but another one will contract with someone that doesn't.

I mean,

even before this, we had something of like a halfway between a hypothetical and a real situation when a security researcher found that a ID verification service for TikTok, Uber, X exposed people's drivers' licenses.

Like there was some sort of exposed database, and as part of that flow, the researcher was able to get those licenses.

And in that case, that was a security researcher trying to warn the company to get the issue fixed and that sort of thing.

No evidence it was,

you know, done

maliciously or used by hackers or entered by hackers.

Well, now the full-on reel one has happened, which is like, these are hackers trying to extort people.

Well, extort Discord.

Yeah.

Can I read you something unrelated that I just saw that is sort of related, which is Sam Altman just tweeted maybe the craziest tweet I've ever seen, which is

we made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues.

We realized this made it less useful/slash-enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of this issue, we wanted to make this right.

Then they talk a little bit about how they believe they have solved the mental health issues associated with ChatGPT, which,

okay, huge like claim to make.

Goes on to say in December, as we roll out age gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

Let's go.

So ChatGPT is getting into the porn chat bot business, seemingly, but behind an age gate.

And like, how will that age gate work?

I don't know.

Uploading selfie, like unclear at the moment, but

I don't know.

I literally just saw that as we were reading it.

And the idea that they're, that they, one, have solved mental health on ChatGPT

while they're being sued for like various people who have died because of advice that ChatGPT gave them.

And also,

we're going to roll out porn, but behind an age gate.

Good stuff.

This tweet is like

micro-targeted to Sam because it has the mental health, AI, chatbot stuff in there.

And we're now going to give porn to adults, also behind an age verification gate.

Sam, what do you think of it?

It's Sam versus Sam.

It's

yes.

He's reading my, my browser history and is like, how can I piss her off?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's reading 404 and concocting schemes to for us to blog about at this point.

yeah so i mean that was an interruption but it is

this is like uh

front and center at the moment across like

i feel almost every service that we use online because uh

i think that one like as

as these age verification laws are being pushed more heavily um you know we're a lot of services have to put it in.

And then the other thing that's happening is services are voluntarily age gating things because they're being blamed for bad outcomes happening to children because they've like rolled back all of these uh content moderation things and so they're like oh like anything goes as long as you prove that you're an adult uh and prove that you're an adult by like giving us your id and a selfie and so on and so forth um there was one like little

not a quibble but Let's clarify the difference between an age-related appeals process and age verification.

I think here it's like what happened shows the danger of age verification, but age-related appeals is perhaps something slightly different.

Joe, you got in the weeds on this, right?

A little bit.

Yeah.

As far as I understand, age-related appeals is not the same as age verification.

Like you go to a help page on the Discord website and it says, help, I'm old enough to use Discord in my country, but I get locked out.

That's when you have to you know appeal and provide your ID and of course in lots of circumstances you know in especially a social media network or something like that companies are not supposed to provide products to say under 13s or something like that so that would be more the age related appeals and then to me the age verification stuff would be like the law in the UK or the stuff that Sam was talking about, like these particular...

The state laws and the state laws.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I feel like we're still

we're still obviously seeing the rollout of those.

So, um, I mean, there's no indication that the breach necessarily impacts age verification stuff.

The two driver's licenses or the two IDs we saw, one was Ontario, Canada, and the other was, I think, Colorado, obviously, in the US.

So it is impacting stuff in North America.

It was 70,000 IDs in total, which doesn't sound like a lot in the grand scheme of data breaches.

But again, that's really, really sensitive stuff.

And it could be linked to their other activity.

And I guess just to clarify, that last thing I said at the top that I didn't put in the article just because it was, you know, the day later or whatever.

But yeah, 5CA was the

third-party service provider, the Discord, it blamed it on them.

And I'll just say, it's pretty unusual.

Like, usually a company that is somehow impacted by a breach like Discord or whatever will just put out, hey, we're impacted.

It was a third-party service provider, especially in the case of like those snowflake breaches a while ago, right?

Not many, as far as I can remember, of the blog posts or the companies said, yeah, it was Snowflake and we didn't have 2FA and that's why we got screwed over.

Pretty unusual for Discord to say this, but maybe it was because the

hackers were kind of throwing Zendesk after

under the bus in their Telegram messages.

So I don't know.

Just a weird wrinkle there.

All right.

Let's leave that there.

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