Meta fires 8,000 to cut costs, doubles down on AI replacing human work

Daniel McKinnon, a 40-year-old engineer at Meta, had spent years developing artificial intelligence systems for the social media company. His work contributed to multiple products: improving the speech recognition of Llama, Meta's in-house AI model; enhancing the "smart" capabilities of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses; and making the company's own AI chips more efficient. Yet in mid-May, McKinnon found himself among the approximately 8,000 Meta employees—10 percent of the company's total workforce—who received termination notices via email early in the morning. The email was blunt: effective immediately, their labor was no longer needed. Those not yet in the office were instructed not to bother making the commute; their access cards had already been deactivated. In public statements, CEO Mark Zuckerberg justified the cuts as necessary to "run the company more efficiently" and to offset the substantial capital investments Meta was making, above all in superintelligent software. The broader strategy Zuckerberg announced was that Meta would become "AI-native"—a company that concentrates its resources and future entirely on artificial intelligence rather than maintaining a large human workforce. The timing and scale of the layoffs underscored that this was not a marginal adjustment but a fundamental reorientation: Meta was systematically replacing human labor with the AI systems those same engineers had built.