SINGAPORE: Meta Platforms Inc is alerting thousands of employees that they’re being laid off, part of a restructuring aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI).
The company began notifying workers around the world yesterday morning, starting with employees in Asian hub Singapore, who got the note at 4am local time.
European and US-based staff were expected to receive word early in their time zone as well, according to an internal memo.
Staff are being encouraged to work from home while the company cuts roughly 8,000 roles globally.
This latest round of cuts is expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams in particular and additional layoffs could come later in the year, said people familiar with the company’s plans, who asked not to be named as the information was not public.
On Monday, Meta informed staff that some 7,000 workers have also been reassigned to newly formed teams that are focused on AI initiatives, including products and agents.
The company, which has committed well in excess of US$100bil to AI capital expenditures this year, had just under 80,000 employees at the end of March, ahead of the reassignments and layoffs.
“We’re now at the stage where many organisations can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership,” Meta’s Head of People Janelle Gale said in the memo, which was reviewed by Bloomberg News.
“We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding.”
Chief executive officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg has made AI the company’s top priority, committing all resources to keeping pace with rivals like Alphabet Inc’s Google and OpenAI.
That’s led to changes to Meta’s workforce and the way it operates. The company has gone through waves of layoffs over recent years, as Zuckerberg has pushed for increased efficiency.
He has encouraged engineers to use AI agents to assist with coding and other tasks, outlined plans to track employees’ devices to improve the technology, and spent time coding his own AI-powered assistant to handle some of his CEO duties, like soliciting employee feedback.
These changes have left Meta employees both frustrated and anxious.
More than a thousand have signed a petition addressed to Zuckerberg and other leaders of the company demanding that it refrain from collecting their data from devices, which can be as granular as gathering keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content, in the effort to train AI.
Others have taken to social media to post about how the threat of layoffs has impacted their work and morale.
Meta’s aggressive spending on AI has caused concern among investors, who worry that the company’s investment may not ultimately pay off. — Bloomberg
