Meta has begun its AI decimation, binning ten per cent of its workers while shuffling thousands more into machine-led roles.
According to the Wall Street Journal Meta Platforms started laying off thousands of staff on Wednesday morning and reassigning thousands more to AI-focused jobs.
Meta chief people officer Janelle Gale told staff that the cuts would hit 10 per cent of the company, or about 8,000 workers. She said Meta would cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles.
In a follow-up memo on Monday, Gale said another 7,000 staffers would be moved into AI-focused roles. A number of managers will be shoved into individual contributor roles as part of the reorganisation, because even management layers are not safe from the AI steamroller.
Workers in Asia and Europe started receiving notices early in their mornings, followed hours later by staff in the Americas.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg thanked laid-off employees for their contributions in a Wednesday morning memo and called AI “the most consequential technology of our lifetimes. This is the most dynamic I have seen in our industry. I’m optimistic about everything we’re building. But success is not a given.”
Meta is racing into a vast effort to remake its workforce and look nimbler against AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to train its AI models on how to use computers.
Executives have said the job cuts are meant to offset Meta’s rising AI infrastructure spending. The outfit plans up to $145 billion in capital expenditure this year, largely for AI data centres and the chips to fill them.
The dream is a personal superintelligence for its 3.5 billion daily users, because ordinary targeted advertising was not creepy enough.
In a meeting with employees a few weeks ago, Gale did not rule out more layoffs beyond this week’s cull. Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts the same week she was unsure what the company’s ideal future size would be, citing “AI capabilities advancing rapidly.”
“If a team used to take 50 or 100 people and now it takes 10, having 50 or 100 people on that team can actually be counterproductive going forward, so I think we need to fix that,” Zuckerberg said during a recent internal meeting.
Zuckerberg said he did not expect other company-wide layoffs this year.
Staff sentiment is at its most negative level on record, according to an analysis of posts by anonymous workplace site Blind. More than 1,500 workers have signed a petition demanding Meta not collect employee “computer-use” data to train its AI models.
When asked during the programme’s announcement whether staff could opt out of AI computer tracking, a Meta executive said they could not.
Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth has spent recent months telling staff what this brave new office hellscape should look like.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work. Our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” he said.
