Sweeping cuts at Meta may see 16,000 jobs misplaced as firm pumps cash into AI | EUROtoday

Meta, the guardian firm of Facebook, is reportedly getting ready to put off hundreds of staff because it prioritizes its investments into synthetic intelligence, in keeping with a brand new report.

Reuters reported that Meta was gearing as much as minimize roughly 20 p.c of its workforce, which might account for roughly 16,000 staff.

If true, the layoffs can be probably the most important minimize to its workers since 2022, when it eradicated 11,000 jobs. The following 12 months, the corporate laid off one other 10,000.

The Independent has requested remark from Meta.

Two senior workers accustomed to the plans reportedly advised Business Insider that the layoffs may start in a month.

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Meta has beforehand mentioned it plans to pour roughly $600 billion into new AI infrastructure and information facilities by 2028, a crucial funding for its AI ambitions. The firm has additionally spent a whole bunch of thousands and thousands to draw AI researchers to its superintelligence crew.

During a January earnings name, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg advised traders that the corporate was “elevating individual contributors and flattening teams.”

He additionally mentioned that he’s now seeing “projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person.”

Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey’s Block — a funds firm that operates Square, Cash App, and Tidal — introduced in February that it was chopping greater than 4,000 workers. The firm shrank from greater than 10,000 staff to fewer than 6,000, in keeping with TechCrunch.

Block overtly admitted that the cuts have been due to AI decreasing the variety of people wanted on the firm to do its work.

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The firm’s CFO, Amrita Ahuja, mentioned on the time that the layoffs would permit the group to “move faster with smaller, highly talented teams using AI to automate more work.”

Like Zuckerberg’s Meta, the corporate is specializing in “smaller teams” and extra AI.

Not everybody buys these explanations, although. Some — together with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — have argued that corporations slashing their workforces are merely utilizing AI as a strategy to justify the will to downsize after the pandemic-era hiring frenzy.

Critics are calling the follow “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 mentioned in a February interview, in keeping with the San Francisco Chronicle.