Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
An exclusive report from Reuters on April 18 stated that three informed sources revealed that Zuckerberg's Meta plans to initiate the first round of large-scale layoffs this year on May 20, with subsequent layoffs to follow.
One source indicated that Meta will cut about 10% of its global workforce (total employees about 79,000), roughly 8,000 people, in the first round of layoffs. Another source said Meta also plans further layoffs in the second half of the year, but the specific details and scale have not been finalized. As Meta continues to observe developments in AI capabilities, senior management may adjust the plans.
In another Reuters report last month, informed sources had also revealed that Meta was considering layoffs of 20% or more.
As of publication, 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 ago, Meta's AI development team, the "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL), led by the highly 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 calling, visual chain of thought, and multi-Agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has released to date. During training, MSL observed predictable scaling improvements in the model during 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 to handle 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 AI front-runners like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Although Meta also admits 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 in the AI race due to the failure of the Llama strategy, Muse Spark and subsequent models in the series are sufficient as his stake to return to the AI table.
The market also gave positive feedback on Muse Spark. Meta's closing price that day was $612.42, up 6.5%, and it has continued to rise over the past 10 days (though also influenced by the overall market uptrend), reaching a closing price of $688.55 yesterday.
The AI Blade 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 about 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 clearly more stable now. 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 that, based on leaked internal documents from Meta, Meta is internally pushing employees to use AI tools more actively, with a target set — by mid-2026, 65% of engineers must have over 75% of their code written with AI participation.
According to disclosures by the自媒体 Official Layoff (@LayoffAI) on X (no guarantee of their source's accuracy): "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 on 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 originally done by humans, Amazon's workforce may shrink."
At the end of February this year, Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter)'s fintech company Block announced 4,000 job cuts, reducing total employees 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, many enterprise leaders 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 of 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, improve 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 on traditional productivity growth paradigms," not long after Block's layoffs, many laid-off employees received invitations to return to their positions (see "The First Batch of Big Tech Employees Laid Off by AI Have Returned")......
AI iterating on white-collar workers may eventually become a reality, but hastily cutting 40% of the workforce in one go, like Block did, can easily "stride too far and tear something."
