Mark Zuckerberg‘s Meta Platforms has reportedly sent a memo to all employees saying that Meta is installing a new tracking software on the computers of all employees in the United States so it can train its AI. According to a report in Reuters quoting an internal memo that the news agency has seen, Meta is installing new tracking software on US-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes for use in training its Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. The move is said to be part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomouslyAs per the memo, the purpose of this exercise is to improve the company’s AI models in areas where they still struggle, like choosing from dropdown menus and using keyboard shortcuts. “This is where all Meta employees can help our models get better simply by doing their daily work,” the memo said.The memo comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been moving aggressively to integrate AI into the social media giant’s workflows and reshape its workforce around the technology. Zuckerberg’s argument on this has been that it will make the company operate more efficiently.
What will Meta’s tracking tool capture
The tracking tool will run on selected work apps and websites as part of efforts to build AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously. These will reportedly be very detailed datasets, including keystrokes, mouse movement, and screen snapshots. The tool will reportedly run on a list of work-related apps and websites and will also take occasional snapshots of the content on employees’ screens for context, according to the memo, posted by an AI research scientist at the company in a dedicated internal channel for the company’s model-building Meta SuperIntelligence Labs (MSL) team.
Meta assures employees: Safeguards in place, data will not be used for performance reviews
On the tracking tool, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the data collected would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect sensitive content. Stone said the data collected via MCI would not be used for performance assessments or any other purpose besides model training and that safeguards were in place to protect “sensitive content,” without elaborating on which types of data would be excluded. “If we’re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them — things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we’re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models,” said Stone.
Meta CTO sent memo just days before on data collection
The data-gathering announcement comes just a day after Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees in a separate memo that the company would step up internal data collection as part of its AI for Work (AI4W) efforts. Bosworth reportedly did not clearly spell out what data would be used for that initiative, now re-branded as Agent Transformation Accelerator (ATA), but said Meta would be “rigorous” about “building up data and evals for all the types of interactions we have as we go about our work.”Bosworth said in his memo: “The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work and our role is to direct, review and help them improve.” The aim, he added, was “a closed loop” in which agents could “automatically see where we felt the need to intervene so they can be better next time.”
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