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Replacing people with AI doesn\u2019t seem to be that easy to do, if Meta can be seen as an example.<\/p>\n
Reuters reports<\/a> that at an internal town hall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not\u00a0\u201caccelerated in the way\u201d executives had previously expected them to.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Meta laid off some 8,000 employees<\/a> \u2014 approximately 10% of its corporate workforce \u2014 and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n During this week\u2019s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts \u2014 noting that they were not as \u201cclean\u201d as they should have been. The cuts were made because top officials at the company \u201cwere worried that we weren\u2019t going to move fast enough \u200cto adapt\u201d to the changing landscape of the tech industry, Zuckerberg reportedly added.<\/p>\n The corporate leader also apparently said that the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn\u2019t \u201ccome to \u200bfruition yet,\u201d although he said that he believed the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments during the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have depicted Meta\u2019s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag,<\/a> according to some of the engineers assigned to it.<\/p>\n Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports.<\/a><\/p>\n TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n