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Mark Zuckerberg sought to reassure Meta employees that there will not be further “company-wide lay-offs” this year, as the company slashed 10 per cent of jobs in an overhaul designed to reshape its workforce around AI.
The $1.5tn social media group on Wednesday cut 8,000 jobs, closed 6,000 positions that it had planned to hire for, and shifted 7,000 people into new AI-focused teams, as Zuckerberg moves to offset his gargantuan AI spending.
In a memo, seen by the FT, Zuckerberg expressed “gratitude” to the workers who were being let go, but said that this was “the most dynamic I have seen our industry”.
He also sought to quell discontent inside the company, where many employees describe feeling unnerved and disenchanted following a rapid succession of lay-offs, restructurings and executive reshuffles over the past 18 months.
“I want to be clear that we do not expect other company-wide lay-offs this year,” Zuckerberg said. “I also want to acknowledge that we haven’t been as clear as we aspire to be in our communication, and that’s one area I want to make sure we improve.”
His comments leave open the possibility that Meta could still carry out team-specific lay-offs.
Zuckerberg has been pouring billions of dollars into his bid to develop “personal superintelligence”, including building a fleet of costly data centres and poaching AI elite researcher talent.
One goal has been to catch up with rivals such as Google and OpenAI in the race to build cutting-edge models after the Llama 4 model it released last year lagged the competition.
Its latest model, Muse Spark, was released last month and widely regarded as promising, but still trailed rivals in some capabilities.
On top of its existing Meta AI chatbot, the company is developing a highly personalised AI assistant to carry out everyday tasks for its billions of users, similar to agentic tool OpenClaw, the FT has reported.
It is also developing photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real time — starting with a digital clone of Zuckerberg.
At its January earnings, Meta executives said capital expenditures could nearly double to $135bn this year and that it was unclear what the “optimal size” of the company would be in the future.
According to people familiar with the matter, Zuckerberg has become convinced that AI technology can help streamline the workforce, particularly by automating certain coding and engineering work.
Some 7,000 staff have now been transferred into new AI-focused teams including one called ‘Applied AI’, focused on “optimising” its AI models, and another focused on building agents to help staff automate workflows.
News of Wednesday’s lay-offs leaked more than a month ago causing rising internal tensions. Staff in North America were told to stay home as emails outlining their fate were sent out in the early hours of the morning.
Separately, employees had also recently been shocked by news that the company plans to install tracking software that would capture their mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes and screen content in order to train AI models — without any way to opt out.
By Wednesday, more than 1,500 staff had signed a petition, seen by the FT, asking that Meta “not collect employee ‘computer-use’ data for the purposes of training AI Models”.
Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in London
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