The absurd survival before Meta layoffs: employees hold meetings to prevent AI eavesdropping, and pad the big model leaderboard time by flooding it with nonsense

CryptoWorld News reports that Meta is expected to lay off approximately 8,000 employees on May 20. Under the intense pressure to aggressively shift toward AI, this tech giant has internally spawned a series of absurd survival defense mechanisms. Although executives promised that layoffs would not assess AI proficiency, Meta still launched an internal public leaderboard displaying token consumption and interaction duration. Under the invisible fear of elimination at the bottom, some employees, in order to keep their jobs, have to proactively send meaningless questions to internal bots, purely relying on “wasting words” to accumulate interaction data. Faced with the recent introduction of keyboard recording software, Meta employees have begun frequently turning off the default “AI note-taking” feature during video meetings, just to safely discuss internal rumors about layoffs. In the extremely tense atmosphere, a post on the internal forum suggesting “paying five years’ salary to those who can be replaced by AI to buy out their resignation” resonated widely. Interviewed employees frankly stated that even before losing their jobs, human workers have already been “preemptively commodified.”