Meta Begins 8,000 Layoffs, Another 6,000 Job Openings Cancelled

The 8,000 job cuts are about or 10% of staff. Meta (META) needs to offset the cost of its AI investments. The implications are sobering.

Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands

The Wall Street Journal reports Meta Begins Laying Off Thousands of Employees as It Transforms Around AI

Meta Platforms began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning and reassigning thousands of others to AI-focused roles, according to an internal memo and people familiar with the matter.
Meta’s chief people officer, Janelle Gale, told staff last month that the coming layoffs would affect 10% of the company, or roughly 8,000 employees, and that the company would also cancel plans to hire for 6,000 open roles. In a follow-up memo on Monday, she said it would also move a separate 7,000 staffers into new AI-focused roles and transition a number of managers to individual contributor roles as part of the reorganization efforts.
Meta is full steam ahead into a gargantuan effort to reimagine its workforce and become more nimble to compete with AI-native startups. The company has flattened teams and started tracking employees’ keystrokes and mouse clicks to help train its AI models on how to use computers.
Executives have said the job cuts are meant to offset Meta’s increasing spending on AI infrastructure. The company plans up to $145 billion in capital expenditures this year, largely to build out AI data centers and fill them with chips, as it seeks to create so-called personal superintelligence for its 3.5 billion daily users.
In a meeting with employees a few weeks ago, Gale, the chief people officer, didn’t rule out the possibility of future layoffs beyond this week’s. On a call with analysts the same week, Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said she wasn’t sure what the optimal size of the company would be in the future, 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,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said during a recent internal meeting with employees.
Meanwhile, sentiment among the company’s staffers is at its most negative level on record, according to an analysis of posts by the anonymous workplace site Blind. More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding Meta not collect employee “computer-use” data to train its AI models.
When asked during its announcement if there was a way to opt out of the AI computer-tracking program, a Meta executive replied that there was not.
In a series of recent internal memos and essays over the past few months, Meta’s technology chief Andrew Bosworth, who has been tasked with getting workers to use more AI in their day-to-day roles, has painted a picture of what he expects the company to look like in the future.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work,” he said in one of the posts. “Our role is to direct, review and help them improve.”

Just the Start of Layoffs

This is just the start of layoffs, and not just at Meta.

If you are spending $145 billion in investments what will you get to show for it?

Is Meta going to get more sales or ad revenue for that $145 billion? If not, then what does it get for $145 billion?

The answer is layoffs. “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,” said Zuckerberg.

Meta has about 70,000 employees worldwide. It does not disclose US employees but rumors are roughly half.

This is speculation on my part, but its reasonable to assume US employees make more than the foreign country employees and thus more at risk.

Regardless, if we run the above math example of Zuckerberg, as much as 80 percent of the staff is at risk.

That was just an example, and possibly on the high side, but who knows?

Perhaps Zuckerberg is trying to get employees to quit. But if you take things at face value, then factor in some exaggerations, something like 35,000 additional employees (50 percent) to 56,000 employees (80 percent) are at risk.

This logic is not just Meta. It’s all the AI-related companies, investment companies, software development companies, etc.

So, even if one assumes it’s not 50 to 80 percent at risk, but more like 25 percent, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of AI-related job losses across all sectors.