If Meta can be used as an example, replacing humans with AI doesn’t seem that simple.
Reuters reports that during an internal town hall on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed staff that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected.
Earlier this year, Meta fired off about 8,000 employees, approximately 10% of its corporate personnel, and reallocated another 7,000 to various AI units, including one named Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.
Zuckerberg reportedly discussed these layoffs during this week’s meeting, pointing out that they weren’t as “clean” as they ought to have been. According to Zuckerberg, the company’s top executives “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough…to adapt” to the evolving digital market, which is why the changes were made.
The business executive reportedly stated that while he thought the company would start to see results from its AI investments within the next three to six months, the projected benefits of the new AI-focused organizational structure hadn’t “come to fruition yet.” Several other investigative reports have described Meta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag, according to some of the engineers assigned to it.
Meta has invested extensively in AI and is likely to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters writes.