Replacing people with AI may not be that easy, using Meta as an example.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall on Thursday that the pace of AI agent development has not “accelerated” as executives had previously hoped, according to Reuters.
Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, or about 10% of the company’s workforce, and reassigned 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.
At a meeting this week, Zuckerberg appeared to address these job cuts. This just points out that it’s not as “clean” as it should be. Zuckerberg added that the cuts were made because the company’s senior officials were “concerned that we would not be able to move fast enough to adapt” to the changing technology industry landscape.
The business leader also said the positive aspects of the new AI-centric corporate structure “haven’t come to fruition yet,” but said he believes the company will begin to see improvements due to its AI investments in the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have described Meta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing concentration camp, according to some engineers assigned to the unit.
Meta has been investing heavily in AI and expects to spend $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reported.
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.
