Meta to Cut 10 Percent of Its Total Workforce

Meta Platforms plans to cut around 8,000 employees, or 10% of its total workforce, with additional rounds expected later this year. Last month, Meta also cancelled plans to fill 6,000 open roles alongside the employee layoffs.

Employees are already on edge over the company’s Model Capability Initiative (MCI), an employee tracking tool that collects mouse movements and keystrokes on company computers to train AI agents capable of performing coding and white-collar tasks. They have called the project dystopian and launched an internal petition urging CEO Mark Zuckerberg to shut it down, citing concerns about privacy, consent, and data exploitation.

The social media giant will start slashing jobs this week as part of a plan to sharpen its focus on AI. Current and former employees describe a growing sense of dread at Meta, with a potential round of layoffs in August followed by another round later in the year. The job cuts are not a surprise, as CFO Susan Li stated on the company’s Q1 earnings call last month that it does not really know what the optimal size of a company will be in the future as part of its plan to bring superintelligence to billions of customers.