Zuckerberg explains why Meta tracks employees’ keyboards and mice: the outsourcing was too incompetent, but the Meta employees are very smart.

AIMPACT News, May 20 (UTC+8): According to Beating monitoring, U.S. labor media outlet More Perfect Union exposed a recording of an internal Meta meeting. In the April 30 all-hands meeting, CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the company has implemented an internal tracking project called the “Model Ability Plan” (MCI). The project runs monitoring tools on employees’ computers to record their mouse-movement trajectories, click locations, keystrokes, and screenshots. Faced with internal pushback, Zuckerberg strongly defended the move in the recording, saying that large-model training data in the industry currently relies heavily on outsourcing, while Meta employees’ average intelligence is far higher than that of typical outsourced personnel. In his view, the day-to-day traces of thousands of elite engineers as they solve programming tasks and build tools are extremely scarce, high-quality training material. Meta is trying to use this to completely leave competitors behind in the pace at which its models’ code evolves.

Besides writing code, this system must also learn to “use a computer” like a human. To help AI agents master chain operations such as navigating dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts, the most direct approach is to have them continuously observe how smart people use computers. When employees questioned the practice of covert surveillance, Zuckerberg assured them that no human would ever view these records; sensitive content would be stripped away as much as possible before any data leaks out; and the data would never be used for performance evaluations or employee monitoring.

Since Meta is facing layoffs, many employees are highly resistant to being forced to hand over personal computer data—even to use it to train “AI that can replace them.” Zuckerberg acknowledged in the meeting that initial communication was insufficient, but emphasized that the project must remain confidential: AI competition is too brutal. Once this exclusive playbook that helps them get ahead is made public, competitors will immediately copy it. And this is just the beginning. Zuckerberg said plainly that as long as this playbook is proven to improve model abilities, Meta will then roll it out across the entire company—turning the computer-operation traces of high-level employees into training material for AI models.

(Source: BlockBeats)