Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted the mistake, telling employees that the social media giant mistakenly did the AI transformation of its workforce, as per an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Zuckerberg is heavily investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he seeks to revolutionise his company's inner workings around the technology, reflecting a broader pattern among major U.S. companies this year.
In the memo, Zuckerberg called the rapid advances in AI and the challenges, which were navigated during this journey.
"Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," Zuckerberg said, adding that he is also "focused on providing as much stability as possible" in terms of organization changes going forward.
"I don't want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our control," he stated, reiterating that Meta does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year.
He stated Meta will try to find the latest roles for employees reassigned to train AI models, following the Facebook owner carrying out a massive restructuring in May, laying off nearly 10% of its workforce worldwide and transferring 7,000 employees to new initiatives related to AI workflows.
"By creating important new roles for people, this also allowed us to shrink the size of teams knowing that if we make mistakes in some places, then we could transfer some people back," Zuckerberg stated.
Meta has yet to officially comment on the memo by Reuters.
Currently, Meta plans to invest money in team-building initiatives, Zuckerberg stated.
This move suggests Zuckerberg regrets laying off employees to replace them with AI.
Notably Meta has taken note of concerns over the broadening of manager oversight responsibilities and plans to scale back the practice.
Meta's new Applied AI Engineering unit reportedly had a flat structure with up to 50:1 ratio of individual contributors to managers.
