Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff at an internal town hall on Thursday that the development pace of AI agents had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected, according to Reuters. He said the work had not reached the anticipated speed.
Workforce changes and reassignments
Earlier this year Meta carried out significant workforce changes: it laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10 percent of its corporate workforce, and reassigned around 7,000 more to various AI groups, including a unit called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.
At the town hall, Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged that the layoffs were not as “clean” as they should have been. He said senior leaders were concerned they would not move quickly enough to adapt to changes in the tech industry, and that concern drove the decisions.
When might returns appear?
Zuckerberg also said the expected upside from the new AI-focused company structure had not yet “come to fruition,” but he believed the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments within the next three to six months.
Internal criticism and reports
Several investigative reports have portrayed Meta’s months-old AI unit in harsh terms; some engineers assigned to it described the environment as a “soul-crushing gulag,” according to those reports.
Meta’s AI spending plans
Reuters reports that Meta plans to invest heavily in AI this year, with projected spending on AI infrastructure that could reach as much as $145 billion.
TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.
