{"id":600048,"date":"2026-05-23T16:25:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T16:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/600048\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T16:25:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T16:25:12","slug":"inside-the-bloodletting-at-meta-as-mark-zuckerberg-pivots-to-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/600048\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the bloodletting at Meta as Mark Zuckerberg pivots to AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

The email arrived while he slept \u2014 at 4am \u2014 so that it was waiting for him when he woke up. \u201cUnfortunately, your role has been eliminated as part of today\u2019s reorganisation,\u201d read the message. \u201cIf you are already in the office, we ask that you please gather any personal items at your desk and head home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dean Hogarth, a 40-year-old father of a new-born baby, had been made redundant.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really surprised,\u201d he said. Hogarth, whose name has been changed, had spent nearly seven years at Meta. He was a top performer, attaining the highest rating possible from his manager. And he worked on the artificial intelligence team, helping improve the efficiency of the company\u2019s AI models.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the exact profile of the person that they would want to keep,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is extremely scary. But I would do the same if I were Mark [Zuckerberg]. I might do it in a kinder, gentler, more humane way, but it\u2019s coming, and I don\u2019t think people are ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg, chief executive of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner, last week laid off 8,000 people \u2014 10 per cent of Meta\u2019s 80,000-strong workforce \u2014 as he pivots the $1.5 trillion (\u00a31.1 trillion) social media giant towards artificial intelligence. Back in 2022, Zuckerberg spent $32 billion on AI infrastructure. In 2026, he plans to invest up to $145 billion \u2014 an increase of $113 billion \u2014 to build the fleet of vast data centres required to attain \u201csuperintelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n

Humans were a casualty<\/a> of that shift in priorities.<\/p>\n

But the layoffs were only part of the change. Zuckerberg also reassigned another 7,000 people into new, AI-focused roles. In a note to employees, he offered little comfort. \u201cSuccess isn\u2019t a given. AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes. The companies that lead the way will define the next generation,\u201d he wrote. After a series of mass redundancies in recent years, he pledged only that more company-wide cuts would not happen \u201cthis year\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"MarkAt Zuckerberg\u2019s tech giant, staff have pushed back against being tracked by AIGettyON HENRY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Hogarth said: \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019m leaking any intel to say that morale at Meta is bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 1,500 employees have signed a petition demanding an end to a new programme that Meta rolled out to train AI models by tracking employee mouse clicks, screen data and key strokes. Flyers could be found around Meta\u2019s headquarters, in Menlo Park, California, with a kitten in a hard hat saying, \u201cI sure hope I don\u2019t get my data extracted for AI training today\u201d. <\/p>\n

The tracking programme is understood to be part of an effort to create AI tools to increase efficiency \u2014 or even replace entire functions with bots.<\/p>\n

\"AnMeta\u2019s Menlo Park headquartersTAYFUN COSKUN\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg has made big shifts before. Early in Facebook\u2019s life, he forced the company to completely reorient around the smartphone and away from its roots as a website. He spent nearly $100 billion on the metaverse before throwing in the towel this year, shutting down Meta\u2019s core Horizon Worlds app and axing more than 1,000 people in January from the Reality Labs arm. <\/p>\n

And now he is pivoting, hard, to AI. Or to put it another way, he is going all-in on the machines, leaving those humans who survive the latest bloodletting to fret if they are, in effect, living on borrowed time.<\/p>\n

The day after Zuckerberg wielded the axe, Gavin Newsom, California\u2019s governor and expected 2028 presidential candidate, signed an executive order to prepare workers in his state \u2014 ground zero of the AI revolution \u2014 for mass disruption. <\/p>\n

\"CaliforniaGavin NewsomNATHAN POSNER\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Newsom said: \u201cThis moment demands that we reimagine the entire system \u2014 how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future \u2014 and that work is starting right here in the Golden State.\u201d The order directed state agencies to explore new policies ranging from retraining to new severance standards and employment insurance.<\/p>\n

Meta is not the first to make such a move. In February, billionaire Jack Dorsey laid off 40 per cent of his workers at payments firm Block. Larry Ellison\u2019s Oracle announced 30,000 redundancies<\/a> the next month, while Evan Spiegel at Snap got rid of over 16 per cent of his workforce in April \u2014 more than 1,000 people.<\/p>\n

Bill Winters, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, apologised on Friday for his language<\/a> when referring to the almost 8,000 people set to lose their jobs at his bank to AI. Three days earlier, he had explained that the job cuts were \u201cnot cost-cutting \u2026 it\u2019s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we\u2019re putting in\u201d. <\/p>\n

\"BillBill WintersLUCY YOUNG FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n

On Wednesday HSBC chief executive Georges Elhedery urged his staff to get on board with AI, saying they should not be \u201cfighting us, not disenfranchised, not anxious, overwhelmed, and resisting the change\u201d.<\/p>\n

While each cited AI as the primary driver of job cuts, Zuckerberg\u2019s move carries extra weight. He may be controversial outside Silicon Valley, but within the industry he is revered \u2014 seen as a leader willing to take big bets. Where he goes, others follow.<\/p>\n

The cuts will leave Meta with 20 per cent fewer workers than the pandemic-era high of 86,000 in 2021. That year, the company earned $39 billion on $117 billion in sales. Since then, Meta has grown dramatically, partly due to AI tools that improved ad conversion rates and targeting. In 2025, it banked $83 billion in profits on revenues of $200 billion.<\/p>\n

In other words, the company is twice as profitable with a fifth fewer humans. It is doing more with less. <\/p>\n

Start-ups and big companies alike are under pressure to do the same. Tom Blomfield, the founder of challenger bank Monzo and a partner at the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator Y Combinator, last week ordered 200 founders in the current batch at its boot camp to build \u201cself-improving companies\u201d with AI at their centre.<\/p>\n

To do this, he encouraged them to \u201crecord everything\u201d \u2014 every email, every chat message, and even offline interactions via wearable recording devices and meeting rooms decked out with microphones. The goal: to make every interaction, however minute, \u201clegible\u201d to an ever-expanding \u201ccompany brain\u201d that directs AI agents to make decisions and \u201cimprove the company while you sleep\u201d. Middle management, he added, was \u201cdone\u201d.<\/p>\n

That type of fervour is stirring angst in everyone from politicians to billionaires, senior executives to young people. Indeed, when Eric Schmidt, the billionaire former chief of Google owner Alphabet, delivered the graduation address to thousands of students at the Arizona University this month, he was drowned out by boos when he started talking about the rise of AI. <\/p>\n

\"EricEric Schmidt MARCO BELLO\/REUTERS<\/p>\n

\u201cI know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear,\u201d he said. \u201cThe question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hogarth understands the angst because, from his perspective, it is well-founded. \u201cMy co-workers who were impacted, especially the ones that were less interested about this AI stuff, it really sucks for them,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were doing a fine job at the Meta of 2024, and now that\u2019s not useful any more.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The email arrived while he slept \u2014 at 4am \u2014 so that it was waiting for him when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600049,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-600048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}