After returning to the AI poker table, was Zuckerberg's first move to lay off employees?

According to Reuters, Meta plans to start mass layoffs on May 20, cutting about 8,000 employees (10% of total) in the first round, with further layoffs possible in the second half of the year.
This follows the release of Meta's AI model Muse Spark 10 days prior, which features multimodal reasoning and is seen as a key step in Meta's AI competition, with stock prices rising.
Meta is pushing for increased AI tool usage among employees, with goals such as 65% of engineers having over 75% of code AI-assisted by mid-2026, and linking AI use to promotions.
Similarly, companies like Amazon, Block, and Snap have also cited AI for layoffs, but Block later recalled some employees, indicating caution is needed to avoid drastic moves.

Written by: Azuma

Reuters reported exclusively on April 18 that three sources familiar with the matter told them that Zuckerberg's Meta plans to launch the first round of large-scale layoffs this year on May 20, with further layoffs to follow.

According to one source, Meta will cut about 10% of its global workforce (out of a total of about 79,000 employees), or approximately 8,000 people, in its first round of layoffs . Another source indicated that Meta plans further layoffs in the second half of this year, but the specific timing and scale have not yet been finalized. Meta executives may adjust the plans as they continue to monitor the development of its AI capabilities.

In another Reuters report last month, sources also revealed that Meta was considering laying off 20% or more of its workforce.

As of this writing, Meta declined to comment on the timing and scale of the layoffs.

Ten days ago, Meta had just caught up with the AI race.

Just 10 days ago, Meta's AI development team, "Meta Superintelligence Labs" (MSL), led by Alexandr Wang, a Chinese-American genius poached by Meta at a high price, released its first self-developed AI model, Muse Spark.

Alexandr Wang revealed that MSL rebuilt its entire AI technology stack from scratch over the past nine months. Muse Spark is a native multimodal inference model that supports tool calls, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration. This is the most powerful model Meta has ever released. During training, MSL observed predictable scalability improvements in the model during pre-training, reinforcement learning, and inference phases during testing.

Muse Spark also supports a "Contemplating Mode," which orchestrates multiple parallel inference agents specifically designed for handling complex scientific problems and reasoning tasks. In testing, MSL found its performance to be competitive with extreme inference models such as Gemini Deep Think and GPT Pro.

As Meta's first substantial product after heavily investing in AI and shifting to a closed-source model, Muse Spark is widely regarded by the market as the beginning of Meta's pursuit of the top AI players such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Although Meta also admits that the model is not as capable as the flagship models of the top three companies in some aspects, for Zuckerberg, who had long fallen behind in the AI race due to the failure of the Llama route, Muse Spark and its subsequent models are enough to serve as his chips to return to the AI table.

The market also gave positive feedback to Muse Spark. Meta closed at $612.42 that day, up 6.5%, and continued to rise over the next 10 days (also influenced by the overall market uptrend). Yesterday's closing price reached $688.55.

AI's sharpest weapon has first fallen on the heads of its employees.

In late 2022 and early 2023, Meta launched its controversial "Year of Efficiency" program, resulting in the largest layoff in the company's history, cutting approximately 21,000 jobs. This latest round of layoffs could very well be Meta's largest since the "Year of Efficiency."

Compared to the "Year of Efficiency," which saw a significant drop in stock price and adjustment pressures following excessive growth during the pandemic, Meta is now clearly more financially stable. However, executives envision a future with fewer management layers and an organizational structure where AI-assisted employees can lead to greater efficiency.

Last month, Business Insider reported that, according to leaked documents from Meta, the company is pushing employees to use AI tools more actively, with a goal that by mid-2026, 65% of engineers will have more than 75% of their code written with the help of AI.

According to Official Layoff ( @LayoffAI ), a self-media outlet on X focusing on layoffs at major companies (no source available, so authenticity cannot be guaranteed): "Starting this year, Meta has incorporated 'AI-driven impact' into the performance evaluation of all employees, making it a core indicator. Without using AI, promotion is impossible. Meta has become the first major tech company to formally link AI usage to promotion."

AI-driven white-collar workers are no longer an isolated case.

Layoffs based on the excuse of "AI improving productivity" are not an isolated case.

Last October, Amazon laid off as many as 30,000 jobs across its logistics, payments, video games, and cloud computing divisions. CEO Andy Jassy had earlier foreshadowed this round of layoffs, stating, " As the company increasingly uses AI to perform tasks traditionally done by humans, Amazon's workforce may shrink. "

In late February of this year, Block, the fintech company founded by Jack Dorsey (also the founder of Twitter), announced 4,000 job cuts, reducing its total workforce from over 10,000 to less than 6,000, in order to promote a more streamlined, flatter organizational structure centered on AI. Block's CFO and COO, Amrita Ahuja, revealed that after the company announced the layoffs, a large number of corporate executives proactively contacted Block, seeking to replicate this "script."

Earlier this week, Snap, a direct competitor to Instagram, also cut approximately 1,000 jobs. Its CEO, Evan Spiegel, stated, " AI will enable our teams to reduce repetitive tasks, increase efficiency, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers. "

Now, the same winds have blown to Menlo Park, California, and Zuckerberg has raised his sword.

Oh right, there's one more thing worth mentioning. Although Jack Dorsey made a high-profile statement during the layoffs, claiming that "the rapid development of AI is iterating on the traditional productivity growth paradigm," many of the laid-off employees received invitations to return to work shortly after the Block layoffs .

AI-powered white-collar jobs may eventually become a reality, but companies like Block hastily laid off 40% of their staff at once, which could easily backfire.