Meta fires 8,000 workers, shifts 7,000 others to train AI models

Thousands of Meta employees woke up to emails on Wednesday morning letting them know their jobs had been eliminated. On Monday, the company said mass layoffs are coming and told workers to work remotely on Wednesday. About 10% of the global workforce will be eliminated so that the company can spend more on artificial intelligence.

In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Meta head Mark Zuckerberg told staffers that they will be training their AI replacements. The cuts are in service to more spending on AI development and infrastructure.

In the meeting, a clip of which was shared by non-profit newsroom More Perfect Union, Zuckerberg addressed how employees would be used to train Meta's artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg spoke about three key elements of "what makes these AI models great." These include research, architecture, infrastructure, efficiency, and reliability. The third piece, he said, is the humans fed to the AI to train it.

"And then the third piece... is effectively the data and what knowledge it learns," Zuckerberg told staff in the leaked call. "So we're in a phase where basically the AI models learn from having real— from watching really smart people do things, and if you're trying to get it to be able to do certain capabilities, having it be able to observe really smart people doing those things is very important."

"In general, the average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks," he said later in the call. "...So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools that or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company.

"So that's one example. Another thing that our system needs to be very good at is using computers, so the way that you get a system to be good at using computers is by having it watch really smart people use computers."

Of those who remain, about 7,000 workers will be moved to the new AI initiatives. They will be used to train the AI. Reassigned staffers will end up in areas such as Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator XFN, and Central Analytics, while others will work on getting AI systems up to speed to be "capable of autonomously performing workplace functions," Fox Business writes.

The reason for the layoffs is so that Meta can better lean into artificial intelligence. The news came via a memo from Meta's so-called Chief People Officer Janelle Gale, who said layers of management would be eliminated. The company had 78,000 workers ahead of the layoffs.

"As org leaders worked on the changes," Gale said in the Monday memo, "many of them incorporated AI native design principles into their new org structures. Many orgs can operate with a flatter structure with smaller teams of pods/cohorts that can move faster and with more ownership. We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding."

One staffer told reporters, "I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry. This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job." US workers may receive severance packages of 4 months of base pay plus additional pay based on seniority.

Meta staffers have circulated a petition internally to prevent the company from remotely monitoring their keystrokes and mouse movements. Zuckerberg was asked about that initiative, which requires workers to install the tracking tool on their devices, on the April 30 call.

Fliers were distributed around the offices encouraging staffers to sign an online petition. Meta has attempted to remove those fliers. That petition states that "it should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training." Meta went ahead with the employee tracking tool anyway.