Meta reportedly plans to lay off 20% of its staff; Zuckerberg once talked about AI efficiency: One person can be as effective as an entire team!

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Meta is transferring the cost pressures of the AI arms race onto its employee headcount.

According to Reuters on Saturday, Meta is planning massive layoffs, with the proportion possibly reaching 20% or even higher, aiming to offset huge investments in AI infrastructure and prepare for efficiency improvements brought by AI-assisted work.

According to three sources familiar with the matter, Meta's senior management has recently signaled to other top leaders to start planning downsizing plans. If the final layoff ratio is set at 20%, based on Meta's approximately 79,000 employees as of the end of last December, the number of layoffs will exceed 15,000, making it the largest layoff since the company's massive restructuring during its “Year of Efficiency” in 2022-2023.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone responded, saying, "This is speculative reporting about hypothetical plans," and did not officially confirm the plan.

The Dual Logic of AI Betting and Efficiency Reshaping

Behind this layoff plan is Meta’s aggressive bet on AI.

The company announced a plan to invest $600 billion in data center construction by 2028, while also spending at least $2 billion to acquire AI startup Manus, and completed an acquisition this week of AI social platform Moltbook. To form a super intelligence team, Meta has offered top AI researchers four-year compensation packages worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

However, the background of these investments is not optimistic. Meta’s Llama 4 model series faced multiple setbacks last year, including early versions being criticized for misleading results in benchmark tests, and the largest version, Behemoth, originally scheduled for summer release, was ultimately abandoned. Currently, Meta’s super intelligence team is working on a new model codenamed "Avocado", but reportedly its performance has also fallen short of expectations.

At the same time, efficiency gains are accelerating layoffs, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in January that he's begun to see "projects that used to require large teams now can be done by a single very talented person."

This view aligns with the industry trend; Amazon confirmed layoffs of about 16,000 employees in January, around 10% of its workforce; fintech company Block cut nearly half its staff last month, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly attributing it to the growing capabilities of AI tools.

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