Meta Tells Workers Building Metaverse To Use AI to 'Go 5x Faster' (wired.com) 76
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. From the report: "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."
"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[stasize] is metastasizing 5x faster (Score:5, Funny)
The cancer has fully taken over. There is no hope.
Re:Meta[stasize] is metastasizing 5x faster (Score:5, Insightful)
I can operate 5 times faster if you want, but be warned that I will make 50 times more errors.
"AI is an attack from above on wages" (Score:4, Interesting)
I can operate 5 times faster if you want, but be warned that I will make 50 times more errors.
"AI is an attack from above on wages" [bloodinthemachine.com]
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https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
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If I'm working at 5x, I want to be paid at 5x.
996 speech coming soon (Score:2)
The "internet time" mantra coming back as "996" these days.
Is this the old bring in a consultant architect for a POC to show the in-house team what can be done in 1/3rd the time and then, 'since the POC is nearly done' get the POC into production in a month or two?
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My points ran out yesterday, someone mod parent up. (But I'm glad I don't have to decide between. +1 Insightful and +1 Funny....)
Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
We are one of the wealthiest and most powerful international businesses in the world. But it's just not enough. The pittance that we pay you so we can stand upon your backs is more than we can bear. So, we will absolutely NOT hire any more of you. Instead, we demand that you do more for us, in return for nothing more from us.
A lot more, in fact.
Understand that YOU are the selfish ones here. You want to spend a whopping THIRD of your life doing things like exercising, raising families, or seeking entertainment. You hedonists! You should spend every single waking moment working for us! We pay you enough to hire servants of your own to do things like make meals and keep your house, so you shouldn't need to spend a single moment doing anything other than work. And if paying these servants means you can't afford to retire, that's great! Why should you ever retire? As soon as you reach an age where you can't earn your keep anymore, you should just politely die and make room for other people who can still work.
Now, get to it!
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I wish you were kidding, but the number of times I've heard the phrase "Can't you just pay people to do that for you" in tech is staggering. And of course, the answer is "Yes, but then I couldn't afford to retire in this gentrified hell market area."
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Now, get to it!
Im altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.
Math error? (Score:3)
Maybe they mixed up 5x faster with 1/5th slower? [infoworld.com]
But WHERE? (Score:5, Insightful)
To go WHERE exactly five times faster?
Over a cliff in full Thelma and Louise style?
Re:But WHERE? (Score:5, Insightful)
The unemployment line.
If the stuff "works" you'll get laid off. If the stuff doesn't work, you'll also get laid off.
"Works" is defined as users will accept the AI slop [fortune.com] created, thus watching more ads, that is the actual output of most of these push to AI projects so far...
I hope your META stock is vested. Otherwise...
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I have heard from people working on Metaverse that they have no clue what's going on and it's basically someone who ate an entire tray of green brownies while playing Shadowrun.
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Nah. When you have super productive coders who don't know the rules of the system, nobody can keep up with the bugs. There's no hope but to delete whatever they wrote, or if that's too hard, start over and don't let them touch it the next time around.
Re:But WHERE? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?
I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).
(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)
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You're such a nerd! :D
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I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe?
Finally we can get legs!
"Modern Times" (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
89 years have passed, management remains the same.
"Increase Production".
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Meta Employees... (Score:2)
...the only people using Meta's AI, and even *they* don't want to use it.
It's only Metaverse (Score:2)
It's not going to kill people or collapse the econonmy if it turns to shit, whithers up and blows away.
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As someone who recently purchased a Meta Quest headset, I can confirm that most of Meta's VR content already feels like mass produced generic slop. I can't imagine that the content quality can drop much more than it already has.
Re: It's only Metaverse (Score:1)
This guy here (Score:1)
The exec sounds like Doc Brown from back to the future... on meth.
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Except Doc was actually right about his claims.
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Great Scott!
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What a–
Oops, Rocky Horror flashback.
Executives believe the hype... (Score:2)
and have no idea how it actually works.
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I don't personally understand it, thus it is magic is the defining logic of our time.
AI is the unmissable example, but pretty much everything about the current Secretary of Health and Human services seems to be another ideal case.
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This just made me think of Terry Pratchet's Diskworld magic (I've only read the Guards and Witches books).
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In a way, yes. The universe runs on narrativium. That's sort of the claim whenever someone makes claims about an area that they don't understand. And nobody understands modern AIs, not even those who build them.
OTOH, there are tightly reasoned narratives and wish-fulfillment narratives. They aren't the same. This *sounds* like a wish-fulfillment narrative, but he may be actually up to something more dubious. E.g. grounds for firing anyone he wants to.
Can anyone here back this up? (Score:2)
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I've found it good at writing unit tests for old code which didn't have them. For writing new code it's sometimes faster and other times I spend as much time fixing the code as I would have needed to write it in the first place.
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I can attest to being 5x more productive on generating the original code for a PR. Especially on projects that I am less familiar with, AI decreases the time it takes me to understand the subset of what I need much faster.
The issue is the rest of the pipeline. Code reviews, dev qa, testing deploy and so on are not much faster. The frequency with which we have meetings to discuss implementations are at the same cadence.
So AI allows me to sit around poking at people much sooner. But so far the end result
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In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.
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My experience is almost the exact opposite (Sr. Rails dev 30+ years experience)
But I am comparing it to how long it would traditionally take me to ramp up on the same codebase vs how long it takes with AI.
I should note that I am not "vibe coding" it, more like ask a bunch of questions and then tell it very small incremental changes. I watch its reasoning and typically review and spec each change before commit.
I still find it 5x faster than the alternative.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.090... [arxiv.org]
TL;DR: Experienced devs feel they get 20% faster with AI but measurements show they get 20% slower.
And then, even if they did get 20% faster, that's nowhere near 5x.
No way. (Score:5, Informative)
I use AI to do software development. It has been super-helpful in learning about new technologies, what's available from big service providers like Microsoft/Amazon, how to get things configured, assistance with troubleshooting. Basically, everything that I would normally have to scour the web to figure out, it points me in the right direction much faster. It also hallucinates, so I still have to ask it for links and review them myself, but even with that, learning these things has been faster.
Not 5x faster. More like 2x on a good day, and only for learning.
For coding, I would say I have hit the 5x level maybe once or twice a year, for very specific tasks that involve writing some shiny new code that involves only common problems. For most of my work, maintaining proprietary systems that have a lot of legacy code from over a decade ago, the code generation just doesn't help. I have tried those tools that integrate with your IDE and suggest code as you type, and they don't speed me up at all. Most of the time they literally get in the way and break my flow of thought. I turned all that off. I have also used Cursor and told it to make changes for me, and it helps a bit with simple requests (but nowhere near 5x nor even 2x overall), and with anything complicated it just screws too much up and I have to undo it all and do it manually anyway.
So, I think that the notion of sustaining that 5x increase is a complete pipe dream. The tech is nowhere near capable of doing that, even when fully embraced. And as others have mentioned, we are just talking about coding. "Software Development" involves quite a lot of meetings with clients (internal and external) and business process analysis and QA and troubleshooting and and what-not, and all AI can do is clean up your notes into a more formal document format. It's nice, but nowhere near 5x.
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I presume it varies greatly based on your area and task.
If you are slapping together a thin generic webui over a milquetoast sql database in a boilerplate-heavy language/framework, then sure I could see massive speedups.
In my particular area, the most unobtrusively useful enhancement is letting it take a crack at a 'code review' before I push it for real. One time it did catch something that would have gone unnoticed that wouldn't have come up for a long time and then it would have been annoying. However e
Re: Can anyone here back this up? (Score:2)
Re: Can anyone here back this up? (Score:2)
My GTX 1080 (Score:2)
Maybe with the raw power of AI and a billion gigawatts of electricity they can add feet to the metaverse.
Also can we please just take the billionaire's money away? I am tired of watching them spend it on stupid shit. Especially when they have the power of the force me to use that stupid shit
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Can run Second Life at probably 500 FPS ...
Long time SL veteran. Not it can't. I'm running 64GB RAM and a 3070 card w/8GB, *and* a wicked fast Net connection, running mostly high settings graphically, and on busy sims like Muddys I'll get 30–60, 60–90 on near deserted sims, and bog down to 10–15 on crazy busy sims. Every single asset is made by SL users, often badly by amateurs, with horrific poly counts ... shoes, clothes, buildings, furniture, lights, decor, trees, all of it. Turn on PBR iirrros and you get a 25% FPS drop instant
Just work 5x faster! Just do it! (Score:3)
Sure... (Score:2)
In 1987, I was working for the Scummy Mortgage Co, in Austin. My boss, the VP, gave me some training tapes after a few days, and I brought in a cassette player to listen, on headphones. Finished them, then brought in music.
Shortly after, he came by, and wondered if I was done yet. I told him I was, then pointed around - a not big room, V-shaped, with four others in it, and the senior programmer and the systems analyst were each on the phone at least 60% of the time.
I told him it cut the distractions, and in
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I had a boss who told me I wasn't allowed to wear headphones, because, "this isn't that kind of environment."
So, I took them off.
I spent the afternoon looking for a new job.
About a week later, I handed in my resignation.
When I had my exit interview with HR and my boss, I was asked why I was leaving. When I answered "because my boss said I'm not allowed to wear headphones", the HR lady looked at my boss with a look that clearly said, "you are a fucking dumbass."
Re: Sure... (Score:2)
Re: Sure... (Score:4, Funny)
Drive-through window?
What future is being built? (Score:2)
"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."
No it's not. It's the present you're demanding of your employees in order to put more money in your pocket.
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"Imagine a world where every office worker is looking like a twat wearing a VR headset while trying to get some work done in a minecraft office. That's the future we're building."
Wrong approach (Score:2)
A typical management idea.
The key is not 5X faster, but 5X better.
Just thinking on going faster is like moving the products to an unknown dimension of grease. The new "fat" products, wasting resources as no one could have been thinking before.
Re: Wrong approach (Score:2)
If you have standards, faster and better are the same thing. Sadly, feceboot clearly does not. Everything about it is shit, whether you call it Meta or not.
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Could be ...
Better products are easier to maintain and will evolve better, and this could later improve speed.
If the primary goal is just to work faster, without enough care of what are you doing faster, then the boomerang will return to cut your head.
Future you are building... (Score:1)
AI compared to Fly By Wire (Score:1)
Peter Ustinov summed fly by wire this way. FBY make a marginal pilot better but will make a good pilot deadly referring to combat aircraft specifically the SU-27.
I was not a fan of AI but I am been using Lama4 to actually right my code. I am a very good programmer and do not need help. But is has made me at least 8x more productive and alivead typos and misspelling completely.
To be honest I can not imagine going back. I used to hire 3 or 4 people to write code. To code what i came up with. The role of coder
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You can't even use proper English grammar or spelling when writing it. Maybe you should have used your AI to "alivead typos and misspelling" (sic) for your post. What does the sentence "how do entry level coders make to being a program are software architect" even mean? I also don't believe for a split-second your clain of being 8x more productive. Thanks for playing!
Oh, and the proper acronym for fly-by-wire is FBW, not FBY.
Re: AI compared to Fly By Wire (Score:2)
I was thinking the same.
Also, Peter Ustinov was a great actor and fascinating raconteur, but that quote about fly by wire seems rather dubious. Perhaps he did say it, in which case I would love to hear the full context which would doubtless be witty, erudite and endearing.
Actually, maybe the whole thing was written by an LLM?
Wrong approach (Score:2)
Expert engineers choosing to use AI tools where they work well is good.
Clueless managers demanding that workers use AI tools because it's the hype flavor of the day is bad, really bad
Inspired by... (Score:2)
wow that's some serious stuff (Score:2)
Re: Stop citing 404media (Score:2)
Wait (Score:2)
AI4P (Score:2)
Ejection size estimates (Score:1)
This is very useful information, because it indicates the size of the Meta rectum they pulled the 5X out of.
Hallucinations? (Score:1)
He's hallucinating.
Might as well wish for the moon... (Score:2)
It is tiring to hear the executives that are clearly so out of touch with the day to day realities of programming demanding anything out of a workforce. Doubly so for reinforcing the amount of money sloshing around because "AI is the best".
If there was even a hint that AI could provide real, sustainable gains in productivity, you wouldn't have to tell the workforce to use it, they'd being using it already.
And nothing will provide 500% gains. Essential complexity still exists, AI does nothing to address that
What are they building anyway? (Score:2)
If it's just plumbing; inventory objects, audio, money, users, and rendering,
shouldn't they have done that a hundred times over by now?
And they have comparatively boundless server and compute to pull it off.
Second Life has had at least 50,000 in-world users, all day and night, for over twenty years.
Figure out why those people stayed and paid, and copy that.
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