Meta plans to lay off a fifth of its employees

(Patria) - Meta plans to lay off 20 percent or more of its employees to offset the costly development of artificial intelligence (AI) and prepare for greater efficiency brought by the new way of working with the help of AI, three informed sources told Reuters.

A date for when the layoffs might occur, or how many people they might involve, has not yet been set, the unnamed sources said.

The company's top management recently signaled these plans to senior executives at Meta, stating that they need to start planning how to reduce the number of employees, two sources said.

Meta has not yet commented on these allegations, The Guardian reports.

If the company decides to lay off 20 percent of its employees, it will be the most significant layoffs for the company since the restructuring in late 2022 and early 2023.

The latest data shows that at the end of December last year, the company had nearly 79,000 employees.

It laid off 11,000 employees in November 2022, or about 13 percent of its workforce at the time. Four months later, the company announced it was cutting another 10,000 jobs.

During the past year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged Meta to compete more strongly in the generative artificial intelligence sphere.

The company offered huge salary packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over four years, to attract top AI researchers to its new team.

Meta also announced plans to invest $600 billion in building data centers by 2028.

Earlier this week, the company acquired the Moltbook platform, designed for artificial intelligence agents.

Meta is also spending at least two billion dollars to acquire the Chinese AI startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.

Zuckerberg alluded to increased efficiency when he stated in January that he was beginning to see projects that once required large teams now being handled by a single, highly talented individual.

Meta's plans are a reflection of a broader trend among large American companies, especially in technology.

Officials have pointed to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the changes. For example, in January, Amazon confirmed it would cut around 16,000 jobs, nearly 10 percent of its workforce.

Meta's planned investments in AI followed a series of failures with its Lama 4 models last year, and the release of the largest version of that model, called Behemot, which was supposed to be released in the summer, was abandoned.

The company's AI team is striving to reaffirm Meta's position this year by developing a new model called Avocado, but its performance has also not met expectations.