Author|Azuma(@azuma_eth)
An exclusive report from Reuters on April 18th, citing three informed sources, revealed that Zuckerberg's Meta plans to initiate the first round of major layoffs for this year on May 20th, with subsequent rounds to follow.
One source indicated that Meta will cut approximately 10% of its global workforce (total employees about 79,000), equating to roughly 8,000 people, in the first round of layoffs. Another source stated that Meta also plans further layoffs in the second half of the year, but the specific timing and scale have not been finalized. As the development of AI capabilities continues to be observed, Meta's senior management may adjust the plans.
In a previous Reuters report last month, informed sources had also suggested that Meta was considering layoffs of 20% or more.
At the time of writing, Meta declined to comment on the timing and scale of the layoffs.
Just 10 Days Ago, Meta Finally Caught Up with the AI Mainstream
Just 10 days prior, Meta's AI development team, the "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL), led by the expensively recruited Chinese-American prodigy Alexandr Wang, released its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark.
Alexandr Wang disclosed that over the past nine months, MSL rebuilt the entire AI technology stack from scratch. Muse Spark is a native multimodal reasoning model supporting tool use, visual chain of thought, and multi-Agent orchestration. It is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During training, MSL observed predictable scaling improvements in the model during the pre-training, reinforcement learning, and test-time reasoning phases.
Muse Spark also supports a "Contemplating Mode," which orchestrates multiple Agents reasoning in parallel, specifically designed for handling complex scientific problems and reasoning tasks. In testing, MSL found its performance competitive with top-tier reasoning models like Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro.
As the first substantive product following Meta's heavy bet on AI and shift to a closed-source model, Muse Spark is widely regarded by the market as the beginning of Meta's pursuit of the AI front-runners like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Although Meta also acknowledges that the model's capabilities in some areas are not yet on par with the flagship models of the top three companies, for Zuckerberg, who had long lagged behind in the AI race due to the failure of the Llama strategy, Muse Spark and subsequent models in the same series are sufficient as his chips to get back into the AI game.
The market also gave positive feedback on Muse Spark. Meta's stock closed at $612.42 that day, up 6.5%, and has continued to rise over the past 10 days (though also influenced by the overall market trend), closing at $688.55 yesterday.
The AI Scalpel Falls First on Employees
From late 2022 to early 2023, Meta initiated the controversial "year of efficiency" plan, conducting the largest layoff in the company's history, cutting approximately 21,000 positions. This time, it could become Meta's largest round of layoffs since the "year of efficiency."
Compared to the "year of efficiency" period, when Meta faced significant stock price declines and adjustment pressures after excessive growth during the pandemic, Meta's financial situation is now clearly more stable. However, the future envisioned by executives is an organizational structure with fewer management layers and higher efficiency brought by AI-assisted employees.
Last month, Business Insider reported, based on leaked internal Meta documents it obtained, that Meta is internally pushing for employees to use AI tools more actively, setting a target — by mid-2026, 65% of engineers must have over 75% of their code written with AI participation.
According to disclosures (unverified source) by the自媒体 (self-media account) Official Layoff (@LayoffAI) on X, which focuses on big tech layoffs: "Starting this year, Meta has incorporated 'AI-driven impact' into the performance evaluations of all employees, making it a core metric. Without using AI, promotion is impossible. Meta has become the first large tech company to formally link AI usage to promotions."
AI Replacing White-Collar Workers Is Already Not an Isolated Case
Using "AI iterating productivity" as a reason for layoffs is already not an isolated case.
Last October, Amazon cut up to 30,000 jobs, affecting logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing departments. The company's CEO, Andy Jassy, had hinted at these layoffs earlier: "As the company increasingly uses AI to perform tasks previously done by humans, Amazon's workforce could shrink."
In late February this year, Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter)'s fintech company Block announced 4,000 job cuts, reducing total staff from over 10,000 to under 6,000, to promote a leaner, flatter, and AI-centric organizational structure. Block's CFO and COO, Amrita Ahuja, revealed that after the company announced the cuts, numerous enterprise executives proactively contacted Block, seeking to replicate this 'playbook'.
- Odaily Note: See "Jack Dorsey's Company: 4,000 White-Collar Workers Are Being Replaced by AI".
Earlier this week, Snap, a direct competitor to Meta's core product Instagram, also cut about 1,000 jobs. Its CEO, Evan Spiegel, stated: "AI will allow our team to reduce repetitive work, increase efficiency, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers."
Now, the same wind has blown to Menlo Park, California, and Zuckerberg has raised his sword.
Oh, and one more thing worth mentioning. Although Jack Dorsey loudly proclaimed at the time of the layoffs that "the rapid development of AI is iterating the traditional productivity growth paradigm," not long after Block's layoffs, many laid-off employees received invitations to return to their jobs (see "The First Batch of Big Tech Employees Laid Off by AI Have Returned")......
AI iterating white-collar workers may eventually become a reality, but hastily cutting 40% of the workforce in one go, like Block did, can easily mean "biting off more than you can chew" (literally: taking too big a step and tearing one's pants).
