Meta Plans Sweeping Layoffs As AI Costs Mount (reuters.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta is planning sweeping layoffs that could affect 20% or more of the company, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, as Meta seeks to offset costly artificial intelligence infrastructure bets and prepare for greater efficiency brought about by AI-assisted workers. No date has been set for the cuts and the magnitude has not been finalized, the people said. Top executives have recently signaled the plans to other senior leaders at Meta and told them to begin planning how to pare back, two of the people said. If Meta settles on the 20% figure, the layoffs will be the company's most significant since a restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023 that it dubbed the "year of efficiency." It employed nearly 79,000 people as of December 31, according to its latest filing. The speculation follows a recent report from The New York Times claiming that Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after falling behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
How many billions (Score:2)
does Meta own?
Re: (Score:3)
Not enough for the "AGI" ravings of cuckerberg.
May Meta choke on its AI savings bet (Score:5, Insightful)
and all the disgusting corporations putting profits above people's livelihoods along with it.
That is all.
Re:May Meta choke on its AI savings bet (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't a "savings" bet, it is the bet of meta's super-smart captain that by putting everything into one basket and getting to "AGI" first, he'll achieve world domination before musk or slopman. Kinda like the story of the lord of the rings, except zuck believes it is true.
Re:May Meta choke on its AI savings bet (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, that's the vibe I get from it too.
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Well one way to eliminate poverty is to eliminate the poor.
They will just keep buying competitors (Score:2)
We would need so many more government regulations and so many more bureaucrats to enforce them if we actually wanted a world where prof
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot's pincer movement (Score:2, Offtopic)
Mongo DB gen AI from the bottom, Retool AI from the top, losing about 20% of page real estate, and the rest filled with stories mostly about AI
Re:Slashdot's pincer movement (Score:5, Informative)
Some ublock rules I use for this which might help:
slashdot.org##div[id=announcement]
slashdot.org##div[id=mdb-sticky]
slashdot.org##div[id=sitewide-top-banner-placeholder]
slashdot.org##div[id=vibe-coding-bar]
Sorry I can't do much about all the pseudo-"AI" horseshit though.
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Awesome, thank you!
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Mongo DB gen AI from the bottom, Retool AI from the top,
What happens when they meet? The demon core all over again?
Reminder (Score:5, Informative)
20% of Meta's salaries is still a fraction of the cost of just one of their proposed data centers. Two things are true here: 1) AI is stupidly expensive and has no meaningful ROI (financially speaking). 2) Layoffs are continued to be blamed on AI, when poor decisions by humans are actually to blame.
Re: Reminder (Score:1, Informative)
Re: Reminder (Score:4, Informative)
AI does improve productivity. It is a fact. Whether companies use it as a pretext for larger layoffs is another matter.
AI lies. It often deludes itself. And that is a fact.
I don't call that "productivity". I call that a high-risk hire equivalent to a 16-year old giving instruction on the jobsite, just old enough to assume they know everything and are right about it.
Re: Reminder (Score:2)
AI is a real productivity boost for Sr. Engineers. I'm on the front lines, I see it.
They no longer have to spend half their time in meetings, asking for resources, training Juniors only to see them leave in 18 months - now, they just get it done.
Vibe-coding is a different story.
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AI is a real productivity boost for Sr. Engineers. I'm on the front lines, I see it. They no longer have to spend half their time in meetings, asking for resources, training Juniors only to see them leave in 18 months - now, they just get it done. Vibe-coding is a different story.
Certainly, because they can spot issues and problems and fix them; and architect a system so that it scales as needed. The problem is, where is the next generation of experienced coders coming from?
Re: Reminder (Score:2)
Leadership don't care long'term. They will make bank to comfortably retire in the next 5 years. Generational fortunes to be made right now for some.
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AI is a real productivity boost for Sr. Engineers. I'm on the front lines, I see it. They no longer have to spend half their time in meetings, asking for resources, training Juniors only to see them leave in 18 months - now, they just get it done. Vibe-coding is a different story.
If vibe-coding is a “different story”, then don’t pretend that same immature AI idiot now teaching and training the Junior replacement generation is actually a good thing.
An overtaxed Senior has an overtaxed problem. Not an AI solution.
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AI lies. It often deludes itself. And that is a fact.
People lie too (sidenote: Lying is the wrong word since lying implies intent, which AI doesn't have).
The reality is AI hallucinations are a problem for very specific applications only. There's a shitton of stuff you can do to improve your workflow with AI despite its hallucinations. That is productivity. Now it's not going to replace your job, but it can make you more productive.
I call that a high-risk hire equivalent to a 16-year old giving instruction on the jobsite
I have an intern right now, I give him plenty of instructions. Sometimes its what they do is wrong, often is right, typically the
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Just because you can't use AI to write a legal brief for you or replace research doesn't mean it's not a tool that can be used very productively.
If I use the hallucinating AI of today to write a fucking legal brief, that only confirms how much faith I should have in the competency of the average human doing that job, the idiot who hired them, and the legal system accepting that. It’s hardly a testament to AI when it’s already been shown that AI can hallucinate about legal cases too.
Pick a better example next time. You already know why.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org] https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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[Citation Needed]
People keep producing studies that conclude AI reduces productivity, while making users think they are being more productive. Of course, it depends on what you're measuring. AI can certainly produce words faster than I can, but so can yes [wikipedia.org].
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20% of Meta's salaries is still a fraction of the cost of just one of their proposed data centers. Two things are true here: 1) AI is stupidly expensive and has no meaningful ROI (financially speaking). 2) Layoffs are continued to be blamed on AI, when poor decisions by humans are actually to blame.
Ironically enough, Meta doesn't have to worry as much about laying off their workers and affecting their actual revenue stream, since 99% of them don't actually pay Meta for any service they provide.
The other problem with Too Big To Give A Shit, is companies like Amazon who can still lay off 20% of their customer workforce and still be too large to feel it.
I wonder how history will paint the Magnificent Seven after the market crash they create.
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Yeah. It makes no sense. If AI was becoming increasingly expensive, I'd expect smart managers to keep more of those low paid meat-sack developers around.
In reality, developers will be much more expensive than a sata center that you can just power down when not needed. But you'll lose all that experience and have a difficult time repacing it should AI "go wrong".
Meta is lighting the path into the future with the bridges that they burn.
Here's an idea (Score:2)
Milli Vanilli? (Score:2)
isn't it ironic (Score:2)
You're training the AI to do the job of the guy next to you, but that guy was ten steps ahead of you.
How Many Companies Are Being Run Using AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
How AI is just as infected. (Score:2)
I don't know what Normal People think about AI but we here on Slashdot have seen this coming for several years now. The comments on this story alone can be summed-up as, I told you so. This sequence of moves from Meta is exactly what I expect from a company who's management gets instructions from AI. In other words, the Stock Owners prompt AI with, How can we maximize profits? The AI has zero regard for People and recommends a pump-and-dump stock manipulation scheme which advances AI's control over the company at the expense of jobs, product quality and privacy. The needs of humans are never a priority for AI.
Oh, so we’re playing the I-told-you-so game? OK. How about when AI recommends to fire all the humans this fiscal quarter, because quarterly profits and bonuses, but then finally realizes two fiscal quarters and 80% revenue crash later that those humans were responsible for feeding the revenue stream that fed the kind of profit that..oh I dunno, kept power flowing to the fucking AI power cord?
Good luck running on bullshit there, Skippy McSkipperfarce, AI for hire.
Unsurprising (Score:4, Informative)
There is nothing at all surprising about this, you have to look at what AI fluent operators can DO with frontier LLMs.
I have a health care startup that has been enabled by Anthropic's AI. The $100/month I pay for Claude Max gets me the full time equivalent of a really smart (but completely unseasoned) developer, and a half time MBA research assistant. I spend time every day trying to figure out how to employ the 40% of my weekly allocation that currently goes unused.
Clawdbot and its successors are sketchy AF, but I did just give Claude Code the run of a one liter HP EliteDesk with a Proxmox cloud install. No way would I trust it with production systems, but for exploring new stuff it'll get the job done, so long as I stand over it.
If you're any sort of knowledge worker and you can't tell a similar story to this, your career is pretty much cooked.
No, just no (Score:5, Interesting)
An LLM that is the equivalent of a really smart developer?
No. Just no. I use AI both at work and at home and I pay for the better stuff at home. It's a really useful tool. I'm also a former developer. If you honestly think that an LLM is now the same as a smart developer you have no clue on what development is or the skillset necessary to do development.
I also know the technology behind LLMs, and therefor the limitations within the technology itself. Transformers can never replace a job where there is a need for even a minimum level of intelligence, it can't even do common sense.
It's always "The AI is awesome, it's YOU that is the problem" in these sales pitches.
"AI fluent operators"... lol
Technology will always win (Score:2)
Michelangelo could have painted the ceiling of the Sistene Chappel in two weeks if he had a roller.
the innovator's dilemma (Score:2, Interesting)
Man, it's got to suck going down in history as a business school case study. The Zuck has tried to avoid the innovator's dilemma by buying up future competitors (like Instagram and Whatsapp) and by investing heavily in the future, but sometimes he picks the wrong technology entirely (the "metaverse") and even picking the right technology (AI) doesn't mean his company will be the one to succeed unless he can leverage his existing monopoly somehow.
Now he's at the point of cutting deeply into the legacy busine
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What exactly does meta have a monopoly on? Social Media? Nope. AI? Nope. Datacenters? nope. So how exactly is meta a monopoly?
They are certainly a big player in the social media space, but you can always go to X, Bluesky, or even mastedon. Let's not even consider that it's just another form of entertainment for people. It could go away and people would just use other platforms.
P.S. I'm not defending meta, by the way. I'm just merely pointing out that they aren't a monopoly.
Can we just admit we're in a recession now? (Score:3)
We put an orange baboon that diddles kids in charge of everything because he promised cheap eggs. So yeah recession was a guarantee but I don't think anyone thought the damage would be so quick. The real problem is that he's obviously racing to get as much done before the midterms so the damage is much larger and also usually we get 8 years to recover from the last Republican.
And if it makes you uncomfortable to talk about partisan politics, suck it up buttercup.
Every single time it we have elected a Republican they have crashed the economy and got us into a major Middle East war. Every. Single. Time.
Reagan, bush senior, bush jr, and now trump. Hell Trump tried it in his first term but there were more adults in the room and they stopped him.
All I'm asking for is just a teensy tiny bit of pattern recognition from grown ass adults
the worst thing about that company (Score:2)
What a waste (Score:3)
It's just absolutely sad to think about how many billions of dollars have been burned by Meta on such stupid things. Hey Zuck, how's that metaverse going for you? [yahoo.com]
Imagine...with that same amount of money, we could have created a program that would give everyone free access to a four year college education. [senate.gov] But to hell with all the Socialists, because clearly this monstrosity [techcrunch.com] will generate more economic growth than free college for all.
Fuck our corporate overlords.
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Meta generated all its money in the private sector with intentions of making a profit. What you just mentioned is, well, socialism. Socialism is of course government taxing everyone and redistributing wealth. The two are nothing alike.
I'm not even making any commentary on the pros and cons of these two ideas, just pointing out that your comparison is apples to oranges.
Chop Chop Chop (Score:2)
I don't think this will be the last layoff. There will be more. Think of it as a bad case of norovirus. I believe this company has a lot of problems and some are fundamental to the business as a whole. When you harvest data from people's daily lives and use it against them, the chickens will come home to roost once people have had enough.
vertical web and reduced workweek (Score:2)
I wrote this 13 years ago for today. The past four years indicate structural change, not the standard "inventory adjustment" previous recessions.
https://www.scry.llc/2014/05/1... [scry.llc]
"The Big Three (or Four) will eventually do significant layoffs as the IT industry goes through consolidation. If you're a current employee and relatively young, you should think about when this might occur."
https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
"The real cause of economic depressions is the mismatch between production time and consumpt
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You make a good point but don't expect any sympathy around here. Half this crowd thinks the purpose of a company is to provide jobs to people. That's of course nonsense. The point of a company is to produce goods and services for a profit. You only hire the labor you need. Anymore and you are wasting resources, both human and capital.
If AI can do the job or otherwise employ one person to carry the load of three people, then you have no freed up human labor for some other task. So either get a job that can't
New Firing excuse (Score:2)
We have gone from "We are firing you because AI does your job" to "We are firing you because we spent so much on AI we can't afford you."
Next up is:
"We are firing you because AI made us go bankrupt."
and then
"We are firing you from the McDonalds because AI bought all restaurants and has closed them down."
From the metaverse, to meta-intelligence (Score:2)
They *were* spending billions of their little artificial world. Now they have to cut back on that spending, to spend billions on artificial intelligence. Seems like an upgrade.