Meta is said to be getting ready for a large reduction in the number of people it employs; this might affect about 20% of all its workers around the world – more than 15,000 jobs, perhaps. This would be the biggest single round of job cuts in the company’s story so far, and would come after two large reductions in recent years. Leaders are, it is reported, asking team managers to find ways to make their teams smaller.
How many jobs, and what is the situation?
At the moment, Meta employs about 79,000 people worldwide. A 20% reduction would mean roughly 15,800 jobs going, depending on the final number of staff and how the company is organised. Although the company’s leaders haven’t made final decisions or said when anything will happen, planning inside the company seems to be going on.
The company has made large cuts to its staff in the past. It cut about 11,000 jobs in late 2022 and then another round in 2023. More recently, parts of the business – such as Reality Labs – have had smaller, specific cuts. These events in the past affect what people expect if a bigger round of cuts is announced.
AI as the main reason
Leaders say that using artificial intelligence is the main reason for the restructuring. The company is putting a lot of money into AI skills and has said that some work which used to need large teams now needs far fewer people, because of advanced models and tools.
New ways of organising the company show this change. The company has made an AI engineering group with a high number of managers for each engineer – which suggests teams that are more streamlined. Leaders have also said that AI tools are allowing people to do more, and are changing what is looked for when hiring and staffing.
Costs of infrastructure and what the company must choose between
Moving into AI is expensive. The company’s plans for what it will spend money on include huge investments in data centres, hardware, and training models. The amount of money the company is expected to spend has gone up year on year as it grows its AI infrastructure and looks for companies to buy and partners to work with, to make its skills stronger.
These costs put pressure on the company to keep operating costs down. Stopping hiring, combining jobs, and making specific cuts are all common ways to balance the money spent on infrastructure with the money put into core AI projects. Leaders must balance getting good results in the short term with the company’s product and research goals in the long term.
Competition for good people, and problems with developing models
The company has put a lot of money into attracting the best AI researchers, including offering large amounts of money over several years to key people it has hired. It has also bought start-up companies and made investments to speed up model training and agent skills. These moves raise the standard for what people are expected to achieve.
At the same time, AI projects inside the company have had problems. Some basic models are said to have not met the company’s internal targets, and the dates when things would be delivered have been put back. When product targets are delayed and costs go up, boards of directors and leaders often look again at staffing and how resources are used.
What this means for staff, and the wider tech business
If the cuts happen, they will add to the wave of job losses across large tech companies, which are partly being driven by the use of AI and adjustment after the pandemic. People at all levels of experience may find fewer places where they are safe from job losses, as companies take on more automated ways of working and put more engineering work in the centre.
For the people affected, severance pay, being moved to another job inside the company, and retraining programmes will be the main ways to lessen the effect of the cuts. For the business as a whole, the change shows that AI is no longer just something that might make things more efficient in the future, but something that is actually changing how teams are organised, what money is available, and how people are hired.
Meta has not said that final decisions have been made, and has described reports as guesswork. Still, the amount of planning going on inside the company and the size of recent investments make a major change to the workforce likely. Whatever happens, the event shows a wider change as big tech companies balance putting a lot of money into AI quickly with the need to show they are managing costs in a sensible way.
