Meta’s metaverse division is ordering staff to use artificial intelligence to work five times faster, demonstrating continued investment in products that have consumed tens of billions of dollars whilst attracting relatively few users.
Vishal Shah, Meta’s vice president of metaverse, told employees the goal is to make AI a habit rather than a novelty by integrating it into every major codebase and workflow, reports WIRED, picking up on earlier reporting from 404 Media.
Shah’s internal message, titled “Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” urges employees to use AI for productivity gains rather than marginal improvements. The directive extends beyond engineers to include product managers, designers and cross-functional partners who should be building prototypes, fixing bugs and pushing boundaries.
“I want to see us go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down,” Shah wrote in the message obtained by 404 Media. He envisioned a world where anyone can rapidly prototype an idea with feedback loops measured in hours rather than weeks.
Meta expects 80 per cent of metaverse employees to have integrated AI into their daily work routines by the end of this year, with rapid growth in engineering usage. The division has scheduled two “Metaverse day of AI learning” events alongside internal training documents about AI coding.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has spoken extensively about expecting AI agents to write most of Meta’s code within the next 12 to 18 months. The company recently decided job candidates would be allowed to use AI as part of their coding tests during job interviews.
The push highlights concerns that bosses expect remaining workers to use AI to become far more efficient, with an implicit assumption that skilled human work without AI simply isn’t good enough. Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told employees in July he expects AI to completely transform how the company works and lead to job loss.
Many experienced software engineers feel AI coding agents are creating a crisis where codebases contain bugs and errors that are difficult to fix since humans don’t necessarily know how specific code was written or what it does. Recent viral blogs from coders include titles such as “Vibe coding is creating braindead coders” and “Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code.”
A Meta spokesperson confirmed AI productivity is a priority, stating the company is focused on using AI to help employees with their day-to-day work.
