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Earlier this year, Meta created a "plan" to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company "AI native," Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta's internal affairs.
Reuters' report highlights the challenges organizations face when analyzing the best uses for AI and determining when the technology is a better fit for certain tasks than employees.
Meta confirmed to Reuters that the plan, reportedly codenamed Project OT (short for organization transformation), explored scenarios in which Meta reduced some team headcounts by 60 percent and that the plan called for two rounds of layoffs. Meta wouldn't confirm which teams Project OT affected.
Meta told the publication:
As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts. This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn't move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.
As part of our company restructuring earlier this year, we asked some teams to conduct a scenario planning exercise looking at the potential impact of redeployments, open role closures and cuts. This ultimately resulted in moving thousands of employees to do priority work on several newly-established teams, as has been publicly reported. Ultimately, we didn't move forward with every scenario from the exercise – and it was never assumed we would.
Reuters reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "set Project OT in motion and directed executives to proceed with the changes to management structures" earlier this year. It said that the first round of layoffs from Project OT occurred in May and that Meta canceled the second.
Reuters said it reviewed "scores of internal documents, posts, and recordings" and spoke with "more than 20 people with knowledge of Meta's inner workings" about the since-scrapped plans.
Per the publication, Meta executives created Project OT in January. Project OT reportedly explored using AI to perform "much of the daily work performed by thousands of human employees." Small teams of people would oversee the AI, the report said, citing "one internal planning document reviewed by Reuters and three people familiar with the project."
In these scenarios, Meta would give some employees new roles and lay off others. One HR executive reportedly said that Meta would have reduced its headcount by about 25 percent or more under these scenarios. Meta told Reuters that it canceled Project OT before determining how many layoffs the plan called for.
Meta was going to use some of the money that it saved from layoffs to pay for high-performing employees, especially those with AI engineering skills, Reuters reported, citing "two people familiar with the matter."
One of the Project OT documents that Reuters reviewed described "AI native" as a company where "AI-ready tools and agents interact, workflows are automated, [and] new builds are AI-first." Being "AI native" also means, per the document, selling AI agents to third parties, which Meta started doing in June.
This year, Meta reportedly launched a pilot program that restructured engineering teams, research teams, and at least eight other teams into smaller groups.
This followed the reported October publishing of an internal post called "AI-Native Playbook," in which a Meta product management team member outlined how the pilot would remove middle management and use "agent-assisted analysis" to help prioritize daily tasks.
Reuters noted that HR employees and "AI systems" would help Meta's leaders decide about promotions; however, Meta told the publication: "Performance rating and promotion decisions were and are made by people, not AI."
Immediately after issuing the May layoffs, Zuckerberg reportedly canceled the November wave. Reuters said it "was unable to determine what exactly prompted Zuckerberg to shift course."
Reuters said March and April reports of impending layoffs and Meta tracking employees' keyboard and mouse input in order to train AI agents (Meta has since paused the program) hurt employee morale.
Another potential factor in Meta's decision to scale back Project OT was uncertainty about whether increased AI use would boost productivity. Citing internal posts, Reuters noted: "For instance, code changes made to the internal software platforms and infrastructure employees use on the job were up 220 percent year-over-year, according to a post by [Meta CTO Andrew] Bosworth in early June. But changes that led to new or upgraded features reaching Meta users were only up 36 percent."
Internal posts also reportedly pointed to AI agents making "large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute" and leading to a 40 percent increase in major technical and security incidents compared to the prior year. Employee time spent resolving those problems increased by as much as 70 percent. Meta declined to comment on these internal posts.
In July, however, Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged during a company meeting that the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected."
Many organizations, including those much bigger and much smaller than Meta, are exploring ways that AI could help with company goals, such as by saving employees time, driving revenue, or reducing costs, including, in some cases, human resources. Meta's story also shows how far some firms are willing to go to implement AI in an advantageous way, even at the cost of jobs.
Meta's case suggests that even some of the most eager organizations may struggle to replace various human workloads with AI while also highlighting the risks of overzealous AI projects.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Monday August 31, @06:31PM (2 children)
Does Zuck only know how the pick the losers? He isn't exactly Midas. Everything he touches and believes in appears to turn to shit or some kind of surveillance nightmare. Metaverse. He even renamed the entire company for it, that is how much he believed it would be the next big thing. Has anything after Facebook panned out? Which probably was more by accident and shear luck. Or the things he bought. Have anything created or bought become better or have they all been failures and money burners? Or did I miss some highly successful venture that he spearheaded or invested in, beyond the previously mentioned. After all the whole AI thing appears to be nothing but an endless flaming money pit at the moment. But I'm sure that will turn around any day now ... gold is right around the corner.
Perhaps the best thing he could do is to restructure himself into retirement. A dumb f*ck. A rich dumb f*ck. But still a dumb f*ck.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01, @02:23AM
> He isn't exactly Midas. Everything he touches and believes in appears to turn to shit
A good friend had a name for exactly this---the Sadim touch.
> Has anything after Facebook panned out?
Many of the people that have a big monetary success like FB assume it was mostly due to them (as opposed to good luck, timing, and other circumstances). Thus they try for a second act.
Very few second acts work out.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday September 01, @11:48AM
It looks to me like bike shed effect. He made this hot product and it ought to be good for something. Maybe bad optics too if Meta isn't eating its own dogfood?
So make the spreadsheet numbers better without regard for what the spreadsheet isn't measuring. Definitely looks like he's way out of his league with this fumbling around.
Usually the point of keeping a founder of a business around is to provide direction and motivation for the company to do well and avoid/delay enshitification. But Meta has been going downhill for years. So why keep Zuckerberg around when the company is exhibiting post-founder syndrome anyway?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @07:37PM (1 child)
Hey Zuck, why stop at 60%? Go all the way to a 100%, this will make you a true visionary. Don't forget to include yourself. Don't take my work for it, ask AI!
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Monday August 31, @08:25PM
A common typo, but in this case it words both ways.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 31, @08:58PM
Certainly, if I were one of the 40% remaining and I were told: here, make this replace your colleagues that we just shit-canned - oh, don't worry we'd never do that to you, A) I'd have my LinkedIn fully updated and be in full hunt mode including engaging agents (who I despise). B) Yeah boss, no worries, we'll fix you up real good with AI here, just let 'er rip, right? I don't know how fungible those big tech guys are and what their market is like this week, but I'm going to guess they'd be able to find something decent to do within 6 months of launching the search and, in the meantime: let's see what this AI can do! Wheeeeee!!!!!
I turned Opus 4.something loose on our 20 man-year project to try to translate it from .net to Rust, just to see what would happen with minimal effort on my end - it burned a lot of tokens for about a week before declaring itself "done"- but it totally missed the point of duplicating the UX on the GUI - it was impressive what it did get right, but it got quite a bit wrong at the same time and I'mm gonna guess we'd be looking at about 6 man months to really get that project right with unlimited Opus tokens. In the meantime, if this was a sadistic boss driven project "yep, boss, it says it's done, here ya go, whaddya think?"
Meta always was a wretched hive of scum and bad coders, unsurprising they are mucking things up worse after letting 60% of them go - can you imagine 6/10 of your colleagues shit-canned and then the boss asks you to train your replacement?
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @09:59PM (1 child)
> Project OT occurred in May and that Meta canceled the second.
Executives at corporations all over have been lied to *so hard* with unicorns _so bright_ that they're all engaging in Project Over-Time, laying off a large percentage of the workforce, and then ... hiring back a large percentage of the workforce, failing, suffering, forcing everyone else to work overtime, suffering major reliability issues, ....
... and everyone "in the trenches" saw it before it happened. There's a vocal minority of Believers in Al, and a similarly-sized group who speak out about its nonsense. It's pretty clear which of the two extremes is more down-to-earth.
FB/Mta offered salaries of tens of millions to a few people, the top, best, greatest Al developers that could be found. This is the result. What would the result be for companies that can't hire the utmost bestest that money can *possibly* buy? This, "Round two was cancelled," is the best that is available in the world. Good luck, all ya Suc--, er, Zuckers!
Time to put Master Syst--- er, Clip--, Weird Al out to pasture, and back to planning resources and hiring talent to do the work.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday September 01, @02:46AM
LLM agents (AI) are tools, not something "to believe in."
Learning to use tools properly takes time. These tools are so radically new and rapidly evolving that there is no "how to guide" of any relevance out there. Learning to use them effectively is going to be an R&D effort - and if you're already running so lean that your people don't have a lot of time for R&D, guess what: you can expect them to suck at using these tools and/or delivering their normal workload, probably both, especially when you downsize significantly.
Somebody, somewhere is catching a ride on this magic unicorn and it's doing everything the vendors promise for them, and much much morw... I doubt that's the case for the majority, not even close.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]