The Covalen layoffs are structurally different from Meta's broader workforce reduction because they eliminate a category of work that the AI industry created and has now automated away. Annotation and content moderation roles expanded precisely because AI systems required human correction to function. Meta's move to cut over 500 of those positions [2] is an institutional signal that the correction phase is over — the models are now considered reliable enough to supervise themselves, or reliable enough that the cost of their errors is lower than the cost of human…