Meta is considering wholesale layoffs likely to impact up to a fifth or beyond of the organisation, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, since Meta is trying to counterbalance expensive AI infrastructure gambles and is ready to be more efficient with AI-assisted employees.

People said that no date has been established to do the cuts, and the magnitude of the cuts has not been decided.

“Top executives have talked to other senior leadership at Meta recently and informed them that they would start planning how to cut two people,” they said. The sources were anonymous due to the fact that they were not supposed to reveal the cuts.

“The plan is speculative, reporting on theoretical approaches,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded to inquiries about the plan.

Assuming Meta commits to the 20 per cent number, the layoffs will be the largest the company has made since a reorganisation in late 2022 and early 2023 that it referred to as the year of efficiency. Its latest filing has almost 79,000 employees as of December 31.

In November 2022, or about 13 per cent of its employees at that moment, the company terminated 11,000 employees. It declared another reduction of 10,000 jobs, some four months later.

ZUCKERBERG FOCUSING ON GENERATIVE AI

In the previous year, the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been driving Meta to compete more aggressively in generative AI. To a new superintelligence division, the company has been bidding mammoth income salaries, on occasion, in the hundreds of millions of dollars after 4 years, to lure aboard the finest AI researchers.

The company has indicated that it intends to spend $600 billion on developing data centres ‌by 2028. ⁠It has also recently purchased Moltbook, a social networking system designed to work with AI agents, earlier in the week. Previously, Reuters reported that Meta also has at least 2 billion dollars to purchase a Chinese AI startup, Manus.

The investments have also enabled Zuckerberg to comment on the efficiency of gains of the investments, saying in January that he was beginning to “watch projects that would previously have required large teams being solved by a single and very talented individual.”

The plans of Meta represent a larger trend in large American corporations, especially within the tech industry, this year. One of the reasons that the executives have cited to have brought about the changes is the recent advancements in AI systems.

In January, Amazon affirmed that it would reduce its workforce by approximately 16,000 employees, close to 10 per cent of the total employees. Last month, fintech firm Block chopper lost almost 50% of its employees, and its CEO Jack Dorsey specifically cited artificial intelligence and its increasingly powerful ability to allow companies to accomplish more with fewer employees.

Its investments in AI will be a continuation of the failure of its Llama 4 models last year, which saw it receive criticism over providing misleading scores on its own benchmarks that it tested initial models on. It dropped the publication of the biggest variant of ⁠that model, ​named Behemoth, that was to be released in the summer.

The Superintelligence team has been striving to regain its position in the year through the construction of a new model named Avocado, the performance of the new model has not been as expected.