Meta to lay off 5% of workers blamed for not being up to standard for Zuckerberg's AI-powered future

Expecting 2025 to be an “intense year of scaling our new product efforts” Zuckerberg said Meta would lay off 5 percent of its workers, firing the “lowest performers”. The internal memo detailing the cuts was posted on Meta’s internal Workplace forum on Tuesday, and Bloomberg reviewed an excerpt of the document. In it, Zuckerberg affirmed that Meta planning to change the strategy in order to ‘move out low performers faster’ so there are plans to hire new talents for the empty positions this year. ”I have now changed my mind, and decided to set higher expectation on performance,” Zuckerberg stated.

“Normally during the year they let go whoever is underperforming but during this cycle the company aims at doing more thorough performance related dismissals.” It will primarily affect more than 3,600 people because Meta had about 72,000 employees as of September. Perhaps it is not as easy as freeing up anyone who has underperformed in the performance review system as Zuckerberg said that any worker who is not performing to expectation can be retained if Meta ‘is hopeful that they will improve,’ The Wall Street Journal noted. Any employees who are impacted will be informed by February 10 and will be given “generous severance,” Zuckerberg said in the memo.

This is Meta’s largest round of job cuts since the end of 2023 when Meta fired 10 000 workers during what Zuckerberg called the ‘year of efficiency’. Those dismisses came after previous one that saw 11 000 people losing their jobs and Zuckerberg concluded that , ‘‘bigger is not better, leaner is better.’’ In 2023, he said to employees that from cutting the number of workers, they have come across an interesting discovery: many things have sped up.

“A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster”, Zuckerberg said in 2023. The workers will work more effectively, and each job will be more enjoyable and satisfactory for the employees. For this reason, we will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That is why in our Year of Efficiency top and bottom management is aimed at canceling any redundant or less important project as well as at making every organization as lean as possible.

After Meta has become “leaner,” it appears that the social media company needs to crank up hiring to accomplish the other part of Zuckerberg’s vision for Meta as a magnet for talent. Another memo shared by Zuckerberg in 2020 points to that Meta aims at building AI, smart glasses, and the future of social media partly through upgrading low performers with ideally high performers capable of quickly bringing out new desirable products.

Meta’s AI updates to its platform are not always a success to the users. Late in the week, an app Instagram unearthed old artificial intelligence avatars and of course people hated them. And Zuckerberg stirred further controversy more recently when a filing submitted to court claimed that he personally oversaw the feeding of controversial training data set of pirated books the subject also of multiple lawsuits to Meta’s AI models. But Meta clearly does not intend to prioritize measures for the artificial intelligence projects to be slowed down.

In December, the company said that the main thing Meta realized after their smart glasses ‘got into their groove’ in 2024 only was that ‘glasses are the far best form factor for a truly AI-native device’ and ‘could be the first hardware category to be determined completely by AI from the ground up’. ”There are infinite possibilities leading the way,” Meta’s blog said, and certainly, 2025 will usher in “the transformation of AI assistants from tools that help when prompted into helpers who can actively support you while you work. From there, Meta has unveiled intentions to integrate the AI glasses with the AR to revolutionise social media, the blog has noted.

From the memo, some employees of Meta feel affected by the new changes The WSJ reported that Zuckerberg sought to explain the latest round of layoffs as necessary to help Meta develop “the most important technologies in the world.”