Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg attributed mass layoffs planned by Facebook’s parent company to increased investment in artificial intelligence and refused to rule out further staff cuts, in comments made to employees during a company meeting on Thursday.
“We basically have two big cost centers in the company: computing infrastructure and people-facing things,” Zuckerberg said in the session, heard by Reuters.
“If we are investing more in one area to serve our community, that means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we need to downsize the company a little bit,” he said.
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The workforce cuts are not related to the reorganization of Meta teams around a new “AI-native” structure and efforts to create AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, Zuckerberg added.
The company’s silence on the mass layoffs, amid announcements about AI-driven organizational “transformation” as well as a new initiative to track employees’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to train AI agents, has sparked outrage among Meta workers.
In some cases, employees openly criticized Zuckerberg and other leaders on the company’s internal message board regarding the changes, according to copies of the comments seen by Reuters.
“Getting everyone to internally use AI tools and do their work more efficiently is not what’s causing the layoffs,” Zuckerberg told employees, though he added that “we’ll see how all these things evolve” and said the company “may share more soon.”
Thursday’s session marked the first time Zuckerberg directly addressed employees about the mass layoffs since the Reuters first reported the plan in March.
Meta plans to lay off about 10% of its workforce on May 20 and plans additional cuts for the second half of the year.
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Zuckerberg and other executives confirmed May’s mass layoffs but declined to talk about plans beyond that.
“I wish I could tell you that I have a crystal ball plan for the next three years about how this is all going to play out. I don’t. I don’t think anyone does,” he said.
