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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears so determined to win the AI race that he is willing to sacrifice some employee privacy to make it happen.

In a leaked audio recording published by the worker advocacy group More Perfect Union, Zuckerberg purportedly answered an employee's question about "device monitoring" with a six-minute monologue in which he said Meta employees are very smart and to win the most competitive technology race in history, he would need to collect their keystrokes, mouse clicks, and screenshots to make its own AI measure up to its rivals.

“We are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model, so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks. I think that this is going to be a very big advantage if we can do it,” Zuckerberg purportedly said during an April 30 meeting in which an employee asked about the "top of mind" issue.

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[-] SnotFlickerman 86 points 15 hours ago

"I know you guys are the smart people, so I'm going to harvest all your data because I'm just a fucking idiot who got lucky on harvesting data and have no issues exploiting every single one of you."

[-] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 15 points 13 hours ago

To be fair he’s also been trying to make an AI version of himself.

The idea is a less atrocious if you don’t have to worry about any of your needs being met. But even then, there’s a huge difference between “I recorded myself doing X” and “we’re going to watch everything you say or do and hopefully put you out of a job with it”.

[-] tal@lemmy.today 7 points 15 hours ago

I’m just a fucking idiot

I doubt that he's an idiot, if you're using technical ability as the metric here (i.e. talking about Meta's engineers). He's certainly written code himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

The New Yorker noted that by the time Zuckerberg began classes at Harvard in 2002, he had already achieved a "reputation as a programming prodigy".[7] He studied psychology and computer science,[14] resided in Kirkland House,[15] and belonged to Alpha Epsilon Pi.[7] In his second year, he wrote a program that he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and help them form study groups.[16] Later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best-looking person from a choice of photos.

[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 24 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I’ve read the code he’s written. (I used to work at Facebook.) He’s an idiot.

He also hasn’t written any code since like 2008, and that shit atrophies.

[-] SnotFlickerman 12 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Beyond this, even if he was a skilled coder at one point, he's not the name on all the major AI research papers out there. Some of those people work for him and he plans to capture their keystrokes etc as well.

He is stealing the knowledge of the people he has hired to build it to use for hismelf.

[-] tempest@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 hours ago

People are fickle and difficult to control. If you can extract the knowledge from the meat sack so much the better.

this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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