Replacing people with AI turns out to be harder than Meta expected. At an internal town hall Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg told staff that AI agent development hadn’t “accelerated in the way” executives had hoped.
Earlier this year, Meta cut roughly 8,000 employees — about 10% of its corporate workforce — and moved another 7,000 into AI teams. One of those new groups was called Agent Transformation. Zuckerberg acknowledged the cuts weren’t as “clean” as they should have been. The decisions were driven by fear, he said: leadership “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt.”
The upside hasn’t materialized yet. But Zuckerberg said he believes Meta will start seeing returns from its AI investments within three to six months.
Meanwhile, reports from inside Meta’s AI unit paint a grim picture. TechCrunch previously reported that engineers assigned to the division describe it as a “soul-crushing gulag.”
Meta is spending heavily anyway. The company is expected to invest as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year.
