Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is reportedly preparing to lay off thousands of workers as it prioritizes its investments into artificial intelligence, according to a new report.
Reuters reported that Meta was gearing up to cut approximately 20 percent of its workforce, which would account for roughly 16,000 workers.
If true, the layoffs would be the most significant cut to its staff since 2022, when it eliminated 11,000 jobs. The following year, the company laid off another 10,000.
The Independent has requested comment from Meta.
Two senior employees familiar with the plans reportedly told Business Insider that the layoffs could begin in a month.
Meta has previously said it plans to pour approximately $600 billion into new AI infrastructure and data centers by 2028, a necessary investment for its AI ambitions. The company has also spent hundreds of millions to attract AI researchers to its superintelligence team.
During a January earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that the company was "elevating individual contributors and flattening teams."
He also said that he is now seeing "projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person."
Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey's Block — a payments company that operates Square, Cash App, and Tidal — announced in February that it was cutting more than 4,000 employees. The company shrank from more than 10,000 workers to fewer than 6,000, according to TechCrunch.
Block openly admitted that the cuts were thanks to AI reducing the number of humans needed at the company to do its work.
The company's CFO, Amrita Ahuja, said at the time that the layoffs would allow the organization to “move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work.”
Like Zuckerberg's Meta, the company is focusing on "smaller teams" and more AI.
Not everyone buys those explanations, though. Some — including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — have argued that companies slashing their workforces are simply using AI as a way to justify the desire to downsize after the pandemic-era hiring frenzy.
Critics are calling the practice "AI-washing."
“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman said in a February interview, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
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