Meta says that its coders should be working five times faster and that it expects "a 5x leap in productivity."#AI #Meta #Metaverse #wired
Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse to Use AI to ‘Go 5x Faster’
This article was produced with support from WIRED.A Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media .
“Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse, said (AI4P is AI for Productivity). The idea is that programmers should be using AI to work five times more efficiently than they are currently working—not just using it to go 5 percent more efficiently.
“Our goal is simple yet audacious: make Al a habit, not a novelty. This means prioritizing training and adoption for everyone, so that using Al becomes second nature—just like any other tool we rely on,” the message read. “It also means integrating Al into every major codebase and workflow.” Shah added that this doesn’t just apply to engineers. “I want to see PMs, designers, and [cross functional] partners rolling up their sleeves and building prototypes, fixing bugs, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible,” he wrote. “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.”
Meta’s metaverse products, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company to highlight, have been a colossal timesink and money pit, with the company spending tens of billions of dollars developing a product that relatively few people use.
Zuckerberg has spoken extensively about how he expects AI agents to write most of Meta’s code within the next 12 to 18 months. The company also recently decided that job candidates would be allowed to use AI as part of their coding tests during job interviews. But Shah’s message highlights a fear that workers have had for quite some time: That bosses are not just expecting to replace workers with AI, they are expecting those who remain to use AI to become far more efficient. The implicit assumption is that the work that skilled humans do without AI simply isn’t good enough. At this point, most tech giants are pushing AI on their workforces. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in July that he expects AI to completely transform how the company works—and lead to job loss. "In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," he said.
Many experienced software engineers feel like AI coding agents are creating a new crisis, where codebases contain bugs and errors that are difficult to fix since humans don’t necessarily know how specific code was written or what it does. This means a lot of engineers have become babysitters who have to fix vibe coded messes written by AI coding agents.
In the last few weeks, a handful of blogs written by coders have gone viral, including ones with titles such as: “Vibe coding is creating braindead coders,” “Vibe coding: Because who doesn’t love surprise technical debt!?,” “Vibe/No code Tech Debt,” and “Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code.”
In his message, Shah said that “we expect 80 percent of Metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year, with rapid growth in engineering usage and a relentless focus on learning from the time and output we gain.” He went on to reference a series of upcoming trainings and internal documents about AI coding, including two “Metaverse day of AI learning” events.
“Dedicate the time. Take the training seriously. Share what you learn, and don’t be afraid to experiment,” he added. “The more we push ourselves, the more we’ll unlock. A 5X leap in productivity isn’t about small incremental improvements, it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we work, build, and innovate.” He ended the post with a graphic featuring a futuristic building with the words “Metaverse AI4P Think 5X, not 5%” superimposed on top.
A Meta spokesperson told 404 Media “it's well-known that this is a priority and we're focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work."
Vibe/No Code Tech Debt
Vibe/No Code Tech Debt Like many, I’ve been dabbling with Vibe and No Code — to see who and what are coming for my lunch. At the same time, I’m reading all the articles on the rise in tech debt …Greg Thomas (Medium)
Phone numbers are a goldmine for SIM swappers. A researcher found how to get this precious piece of information from any Google account.#wired #News
A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account
This article was produced with support from WIRED.A cybersecurity researcher was able to figure out the phone number linked to any Google account, information that is usually not public and is often sensitive, according to the researcher, Google, and 404 Media’s own tests.
The issue has since been fixed but at the time presented a privacy issue in which even hackers with relatively few resources could have brute forced their way to peoples’ personal information.
“I think this exploit is pretty bad since it's basically a gold mine for SIM swappers,” the independent security researcher who found the issue, who goes by the handle brutecat, wrote in an email. SIM swappers are hackers who take over a target's phone number in order to receive their calls and texts, which in turn can let them break into all manner of accounts.
In mid-April, we provided brutecat with one of our personal Gmail addresses in order to test the vulnerability. About six hours later, brutecat replied with the correct and full phone number linked to that account.
“Essentially, it's bruting the number,” brutecat said of their process. Brute forcing is when a hacker rapidly tries different combinations of digits or characters until finding the ones they’re after. Typically that’s in the context of finding someone’s password, but here brutecat is doing something similar to determine a Google user’s phone number.
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