MAROKO133 Hot ai: Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI Layoffs, Insid

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI Layo

Twitter founder and Block Inc (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced late last month that his fintech venture was making “one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company” by “reducing our organization by nearly half.”

Dorsey cited rapid improvements in AI tech as the primary reason, sending shockwaves across Wall Street. He’d previously instructed employees to embrace AI at all costs, triggering major anxiety over job security that turned out to be warranted.

The culling perfectly played into ongoing fears that AI automation is coming for white-collar jobs, a major job market and economic disruption that workers are becoming increasingly worried about — and which clearly has execs salivating.

As big tech was incurring losses over ongoing fears of an AI bubble starting to burst, Block investors sent a clear signal, sending shares of Dorsey’s company soaring following his announcement.

“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey told analysts during a call, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.

But the CEO’s boasting failed to convince everybody that the AI-triggered job apocalypse is nigh. As former employee Aaron Zamost, who was head of communications at Square from 2015 to 2020, argued in an essay published by the New York Times, there are likely a litany of other factors at play apart from AI.

“The question on minds everywhere: Is AI a terrifying new reality in which the work they do might no longer be viable?” he wrote. “Or is Block’s announcement just a convenient and flashy new cover for typical corporate downsizing?”

“The truth is, nobody knows the answer — not even Block itself,” Zamost argued.

The former head of comms wrote that Dorsey had “long placed big bets based on a read of early signals” and “show a tendency to identify patterns, see enormous growth as an inevitability and go all in with conviction.”

But whether AI really explains the company’s major downscaling instead of neatly providing a “new justification for layoffs” remains unclear at best. For one, Block had already seen major rounds of layoffs in both 2024 and 2025.

Its prior history is relevant as well. Between the end of 2019 and end of 2023, the company’s head count ballooned from 4,000 to almost 13,000 employees, per the WSJ, a major pandemic-era hiring spree.

“Look closer at specific cuts — like shrinking the policy team and eliminating diversity and inclusion roles, former colleagues told me — and Block’s latest reorganization reads like standard prioritization and cost management, not an AI-driven reinvention,” Zamost wrote.

Particularly, executives forcing their employees to adopt AI tools, often against their will, could trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy at companies claiming to be “AI first,” he argued.

“That future, however, is colliding with the reality of what AI can actually do,” Zamost wrote, pointing to AI models generating “useless email summaries, antisemitic chatbots, and AI overviews that can’t get even basic facts right.”

“Not all the roles I’ve heard that Block is eliminating can be handled by AI, yet executives are treating it as equally useful today to all disciplines,” he added.

Other analysts were equally unconvinced by Dorsey’s argument that AI had allowed him to cut almost half his company’s workforce.

“The vast majority of these cuts were probably not due to AI,” corporate investment bank Mizuho Americas’ Dan Dolev told the WSJ.

“This isn’t an AI story,” former Block employee Jason Karsh tweeted. “It’s organizational bloat wearing an AI costume.”

More on Block: Jack Dorsey Lays Off 4,000 Employees After Move to AI

The post Jack Dorsey Isn’t Telling the Real Story About Block’s AI Layoffs, Insider Says appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Meta Lied About Its Smart Glasses Protecting User Privac

Meta may have sold seven million of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone — but likely didn’t anticipate the outpouring of criticism when a recent investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten revealed that Meta’s subcontracted data annotators in Nairobi, Kenya, could’ve been watching users through their glasses’ cameras as they went to the bathroom or had sex.

The damning revelations shed light on the AI industry’s reliance on overseas labor for data labeling to train their models, a hidden reality glossed over in marketing materials by one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Just days after the investigation was published, Meta has been hit with a class action lawsuit, which accuses the company of woefully misleading its customers by claiming that it had put privacy front and center.

“No reasonable consumer would understand ‘designed for privacy, controlled by you’ and similar promises like ‘built for your privacy’ to mean that deeply personal footage from inside their homes would be viewed and catalogued by human workers overseas,” reads the lawsuit, which was obtained by Futurism and filed in a San Francisco district court on Thursday.

“Meta chose to make privacy the centerpiece of its pervasive marketing campaign while concealing the facts that reveal those promises to be false,” the lawsuit charges.

“You cannot market a product as ‘built for privacy’ and then funnel footage of people’s intimate moments to contract workers without their knowledge,” said Yana Hart, partner at Clarkson Law Firm, which filed the lawsuit, in a statement. “Meta made privacy the centerpiece of its marketing campaign because it knew consumers would never buy these glasses if they knew the truth.”

The lawsuit “seeks to hold Meta responsible for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline.

A Meta spokesperson told Engadget that data from its glasses may end up in the hands of human contractors, but declined to respond to the lawsuit’s claims.

The spokesperson also claimed that “unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device.”

However, what Meta fails to explain is that using the devices’ core AI features without authorizing human contractors in Kenya to watch the resulting footage is impossible.

The lawsuit claims Meta did not adequately disclose that intimate footage could be reviewed and annotated by a human contractor. In other words, its smart glasses represent a major privacy liability.

“The undisclosed human review pipeline renders the Meta AI Glasses’ privacy features materially misleading, transforms the product from a personal device into a surveillance conduit, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of dignitary harm, emotional distress, stalking, extortion, identity theft, and reputational injury,” the document reads.

“The exposure of such content to thousands of unknown individuals creates a persistent and unreasonable risk of harm that Meta’s marketed privacy features were represented to, but do not, prevent,” it continues.

“Meta made a promise to millions of consumers while knowing full well it could not keep it,” said Clarkson Law Firm managing partner Ryan Clarkson.

“While the multi-trillion dollar tech titan attempted to reassure and placate consumers about these smart glasses through ads about privacy and control, workers thousands of miles away have been watching footage from inside people’s bedrooms all along,” he added. “That is not a technicality or an oversight — that is a system working exactly as designed, and it cannot be allowed to continue.”

Beyond the lawsuit, the latest revelations have resulted in netizens coining a new term for Meta’s product: “pervert glasses.”

More on the glasses: Meta Workers Say They’re Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users’ Smart Glasses

The post Meta Lied About Its Smart Glasses Protecting User Privacy, New Class Action Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com