At an internal town hall on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not "accelerated in the way" executives had previously expected, according to Reuters. Zuckerberg also commented on recent layoffs, acknowledging they were not as "clean" as they should have been, and said the cuts were made because top officials "were worried that we weren't going to move fast enough to adapt" to the changing tech industry landscape.
Earlier this year, Meta laid off roughly 8,000 employees, approximately 10 percent of its corporate workforce, and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, per Bloomberg. Zuckerberg reportedly said the perceived upside of the company's new AI-focused structure had not "come to fruition yet," though he expressed belief that Meta would begin to see improvements from its AI investments in the next three to six months.
Other reports have described Meta's months-old AI unit as a "soul-crushing gulag" according to some engineers assigned to it. Meta is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.