Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Reuters reported exclusively on April 18, revealing that three insiders disclosed to them that Zuckerberg's Meta plans to launch the first round of large-scale layoffs on May 20, with further layoffs to follow.

One insider stated that Meta will cut approximately 10% of its global workforce (which totals about 79,000 people), or about 8,000 employees in the first round of layoffs. Another insider mentioned that Meta also plans to further reduce its workforce in the second half of the year, but the specific timing and scale have not been finalized yet. As they continue to observe the development of AI capabilities, Meta's executive team may adjust their plans.

Another report from Reuters last month indicated that insiders revealed Meta was considering cutting 20% or more of its workforce.

As of the publication date, Meta declined to comment on the timing and scale of the layoffs.

10 Days Ago, Meta Just Caught Up with the AI Team

Just 10 days ago, Meta's AI development team "Superintelligence Labs" (Meta Superintelligence Labs, MSL), led by the high-priced hire Huang's genius Alexandr Wang, just launched its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark.

Alexandr Wang revealed that over the past nine months, MSL has rebuilt the entire AI technology stack from scratch. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model that supports tool invocation, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During training, MSL observed that the model exhibited predictable large-scale improvements during pre-training, reinforcement learning, and reasoning phases during testing.

Muse Spark also supports a "Contemplating Mode," which orchestrates multiple parallel reasoning agents specifically designed to tackle complex scientific problems and reasoning tasks. In testing, MSL found its performance to be competitive with extreme reasoning models like Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro.

As the first substantial product following Meta's heavy investment in AI and shift to a closed-source model, Muse Spark is widely seen in the market as the beginning of Meta's pursuit of leading AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Although Meta acknowledges that the model lags behind the flagship models of the top three companies in certain capabilities, for Zuckerberg, who has long been trailing in the AI race due to the failure of the Llama initiative, Muse Spark and its subsequent models are sufficient as leverage for his return to the AI table.

The market has also responded positively to Muse Spark; on the same day, Meta's closing price was $612.42, up 6.5%, and in the 10 days following, it continued to rise (of course, influenced by the overall market upturn), with a closing price reaching $688.55 yesterday.

The Double-Edged Sword of AI Falls on Employees First

From the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, Meta launched a controversial "Year of Efficiency" initiative, resulting in the largest layoffs in the company's history, cutting about 21,000 positions. This time, it is likely to become Meta's largest round of layoffs since the "Year of Efficiency."

Compared to the "Year of Efficiency," Meta faced significant pressure from a plummeting stock price and adjustments after overgrowth during the pandemic. Today’s Meta appears more financially robust, but executives envision a future where — there are fewer management layers, and AI-assisted employees can lead to a more efficient organizational structure.

Business Insider reported last month that through leaked internal documents from Meta, it learned that the company is pushing employees to use AI tools more actively, with a set goal that — by mid-2026, 65% of engineers need to have more than 75% of their code written with AI assistance.

According to the self-media Official Layoff focused on large tech layoffs on X (formerly Twitter) ( @LayoffAI), it disclosed (without sources and may not be verified) that: "Starting this year, Meta has incorporated 'AI-driven impact' into all employees' performance evaluations and it has become a core metric. If employees do not use AI, they will not be promoted. Meta has become the first large tech company to officially tie AI usage to promotions."

AI Iterating on White-Collar Workers is No Longer an Isolated Case

Using “AI iterating productivity” as a reason for layoffs is no longer an isolated case.

Last October, Amazon laid off as many as 30,000 positions, affecting logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing departments. The company’s CEO Andy Jassy had previously hinted at this round of layoffs: "As the company increasingly uses AI to perform tasks originally done by humans, Amazon's workforce may shrink."

At the end of February this year, Jack Dorsey's fintech company Block announced layoffs of 4,000 positions, reducing its total employee count from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, to promote a leaner, flatter organization with AI at its core. Block's CFO and COO Amrita Ahuja revealed that after the company's announcement of layoffs, a large number of corporate executives proactively reached out to Block, seeking to replicate this "script."

• Odaily Note: See more in "Jack Dorsey's company, 4,000 white-collar workers are being eliminated by AI".

Earlier this week, Meta's core product Instagram's direct competitor Snap also cut around 1,000 jobs, with CEO Evan Spiegel stating: "AI will enable our team to reduce repetitive work, improve efficiency, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers."

Now, the same winds have reached Menlo Park, California, and Zuckerberg has raised his sword.

Oh, and there's one more thing worth mentioning. Although Jack Dorsey made a high-profile claim during the layoffs that "the rapid development of AI is iterating the traditional productivity growth paradigm," not long after the layoffs at Block, many of the laid-off employees subsequently received return-to-work invitations (see more in "The first batch of large companies laid off by AI has returned to work")…

AI iterating on white-collar workers may eventually become a reality, but rushing to lay off 40% like Block also easily leads to “taking too big a step, stumbling.”

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