Recently I've also heard of teams having very little amount of time to prove themselves before they get reorg'ed - which might be one of the reasons that their progress on AI has been slow.
The only person I know that is happy at Meta is someone who works at one of the acquisitions. That specific acquisition doesn't seem to have been infected by Meta's culture too much for now.
I just hope other CEOs don't see this and get antsy about following suit.
>The superintelligence team has been working to reassert the company's standing this year by building a new model called Avocado, but the performance of that model has also lagged expectations.
20% headcount reductions in return for a 600bn capex outlay to train that next gen base model
We don't need half a dozen frontier labs. They're capital intensive.
And since neither Metas AI / metaverse investments worked out, they're back to the same business they've always had: social media. Which is an OK enough business, but not high growth.
Amazing that Meta is even mentioned in the same breath as Google considering the ocean sized difference in what they do and the services they offer.
I know the reason is market cap. But that's the amazing part. That a company as limp and unimpressive as Meta could have over a trillion dollars in market cap.
Watching ads on facebook/instagram is addictive/profitable.
AI investment makes total sense as a proximal explanation. Minimize debt by trimming OpEx, then reinvest in compute. Seems smart.
And yet - this is what, the third layoff in 5 years? And weren't they doing aggressive performance cuts too? Are they workforce planning in 12 week sprints or something?
This reminds me of an overspending sports team: just toss together overpriced players/coaches, underperform, fire them all, do it again.
They have done more targeted layoffs as well like the FAIR layoffs in 2025 and the RL layoffs in January 2026, as well as the 5% performance cut in February 2025.
There comes an uncanny point where a Corporation's beleaguered flailing is indistinguishable from Actualised General Incompetence.
A friend who works in a growing division within Meta also said last week they are re-orging again.. this time flattening out everything and making first level SDMs go back to IC. It’s always been a cut throat final-stage capitalism place to work. Nothing they do should be surprising.
At the end of 2019 they had 45k employees.
It's more accurate to say that this will get them to late 2023 levels which was 67k employees:
