Meta Lays Off 8,000 Employees, As A.I. Casualties Mount
Employees have signed petitions against being tracked by A.I. and were trying to figure out who had been let go on Wednesday, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company.
Employees have signed petitions against being tracked by A.I. and were trying to figure out who had been let go on Wednesday, as the Silicon Valley giant tries to transform into an A.I.-first company.
For the last month, employees at Meta have been on edge.
In April, they were told that 8,000 of them, or 10 percent of the work force, would be laid off on May 20 as Meta remade itself for the artificial intelligence era. On Monday, they learned that another 7,000 employees would be reassigned to new A.I. initiatives.
On Wednesday, the ax fell. The layoffs began in Singapore, where at 4 a.m. local time emails went out to workers who were being laid off. Employees in Britain, the United States and elsewhere were notified early Wednesday morning in their respective time zones.
Many workers began exchanging somber messages remotely and checked the internal directory to figure out who on their teams was cut. On Meta’s internal forums, hundreds reacted to the layoffs with salad emojis, their way to say “salute.” At least one person who was hired within the past month was laid off, two people with knowledge of the job cuts said.
Meta’s offices were mostly empty on Wednesday after Janelle Gale, the company’s head of human resources, told employees this week that they should work from home. On the office walls, fliers sharing a petition to stop Meta’s new program to track employee data for A.I. training were visible, eight employees said. Some workers scavenged the offices for free snacks and laptop chargers on Monday in case they no longer had jobs by the end of the week, said the employees, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.
The turmoil at Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — offers an up-close look at layoffs in the A.I. age. Job cuts at tech companies in the name of the fast-evolving technology have gathered steam. Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been creating their own A.I. replacements. Last week, the networking giant Cisco said it would eliminate 4,000 jobs as it shifted more resources to A.I. Microsoft, Block and Coinbase also recently announced layoffs or buyouts because of the technology.
