Facebook’s parent company Meta is reportedly preparing to lay off thousands of employees as it prioritizes investments in artificial intelligence, according to a new report.
According to Reuters, Meta is preparing to cut about 20% of its workforce, which equates to about 16,000 people.
If true, this would be the company’s biggest job reduction since it cut 11,000 jobs in 2022. The following year, the company laid off another 10,000 people.
independent person has reached out to Mehta for comment.
Two senior employees familiar with the plan said: business insider Layoffs could begin within a month.
Meta has previously said it plans to spend about $600 billion on new AI infrastructure and data centers by 2028, an investment necessary for the company’s AI ambitions. The company also spent hundreds of millions of dollars attracting AI researchers to its superintelligence team.
During an earnings call in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company is “elevating individual contributors and flattening teams.”
He also said, “Projects that previously required large teams are now being accomplished by a single, extremely talented person.”
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s Block, the payments company behind Square, Cash App, and Tidal, announced in February that it would cut more than 4,000 employees. According to the company, its workforce has shrunk from more than 10,000 to fewer than 6,000. tech crunch.
Mr. Block openly acknowledged that the layoffs were due to AI reducing the number of people required to perform the job within the company.
Amrita Ahuja, the company’s chief financial officer, said at the time that the headcount reductions will allow the organization to “move faster with smaller, better teams that leverage AI and automate more work.”
Similar to Zuckerberg’s meta, the company is focused on “small teams” and more AI.
However, not everyone is convinced by these explanations. Some, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, argue that companies cutting jobs are simply using AI as a way to justify their desire to downsize after a pandemic-era hiring frenzy.
Critics call this practice “AI washing.”
“I don’t know the exact percentage, but there’s been an AI wash where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise have done, and then many different kinds of jobs are actually being replaced by AI,” Altman said in a February interview, according to the newspaper. san francisco chronicle.
