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META SHUTTING DOWN
ZUCKERBERG Meta announces they’ll be shutting down the Metaverse, after pouring $80,000,000,000.00 into the project.
The metaverse killed itself. Like we said it would. It was always just a bad corporate version of “second life”. This is evidence that the technology genie CAN be put back in the bottle. No technology is “inevitable”. Same for AI. Meta is preparing major layoffs as AI costs explode.
– Meta is discussing cuts of up to 20% of its workforce
– The company has 79,000 employees, meaning 15,000+ jobs could be impacted
Adam Livingston @AdamBLiv
Meta should have just bought Bitcoin. Assuming Meta buys $80 billion of Bitcoin at today’s BTC price, here’s the math:
At about $71,434 per BTC, $80 billion would buy roughly 1,119,915 BTC.
That stack would be worth:
At $100,000 BTC: about $112.0 billion.
At $150,000 BTC: about $168.0 billion.
At $200,000 BTC: about $224.0 billion.
At $500,000 BTC: about $560.0 billion.
At $1,000,000 BTC: about $1.12 trillion.
Instead of a stupid game/service that nobody used, they could have purchased 5.33% of Bitcoin’s total 21 million supply.
Real-world caveat, deploying $80 billion into Bitcoin would likely push price up hard during accumulation, so the actual BTC acquired would almost certainly be less than 1.12 million BTC.
Still would have been a better use of capital.
Meta to Permanently Remove End-to-End Encryption Feature in Instagram DMs
https://cybersecuritynews.com/instagram-end-to-end-encryption/
Peter Girnus @gothburz Mar 4
I am the Vice President of Privacy for Reality Labs at Meta.
The glasses cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars. We sold seven million pairs last year. Two million the year before that. The growth rate is three hundred and fifty percent. The tagline is “designed with your privacy in mind.” The design includes a camera. The camera records everything in front of your face. The privacy includes sending the footage to Nairobi.
I need to explain what I mean by “privacy.”
When you speak to Meta AI through your Ray-Ban glasses, you generate video. The video requires human review. We call it “annotation.” Annotation requires annotators. The annotators work for a company called Sama. Sama is in Nairobi, Kenya. The annotators are paid approximately two dollars an hour. The glasses cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars. One pair of glasses is a hundred and fifty hours of someone watching your life. I did not design that math. I approved it.
Two Swedish newspapers — Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten — found our annotators and asked what they see.
“We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies.”
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed.”
“You understand that it is someone’s private life you are looking at, but at the same time you are just expected to carry out the work.”
And, regarding questions: “If you start asking questions, you are gone.”
We have a face anonymization system. The system is automatic. The system uses algorithms. The algorithms fail. A source said: “The algorithms sometimes miss. Especially in difficult lighting conditions.” Bedrooms are difficult lighting conditions. Bathrooms are difficult lighting conditions. The places where people are naked are, by the algorithm’s own logic, the places where the algorithm is least reliable. I am not editorializing. I am describing an engineering outcome.
The annotators signed extensive NDAs. There are cameras in their offices. Their phones are confiscated at the door. We surveil the people who surveil your living room. The chain of surveillance is thorough. The question of whether your living room should be surveilled is not in the chain.
Our terms of use — which I helped draft — reserve Meta’s right to “review your interactions with AIs, including by automated or manual (human) means.” The word “manual” means a person. The person is in Nairobi. The person is watching you undress. The person earns two dollars for the hour in which this occurs. I wrote the word “manual.” It is the most efficient sentence I have ever authored.
There is no opt-out. I need to say this clearly. No mechanism exists for a user of Ray-Ban Meta glasses to prevent their footage from being seen by a human being in Kenya. We did not build one. Kenya has no data adequacy agreement with the European Union. Dialogue on adequacy began in May 2024. It has not concluded. The footage did not wait for the dialogue.
Our privacy policy explains: “Data may be transferred globally because Meta is a company that operates globally.” The word “globally” means your apartment in Stockholm is annotated in Nairobi. It is the most honest word in the privacy policy. The rest is architecture.
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