Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees.

The job cuts will begin May 20, and the firm is scrapping plans to hire citizens for 6,000 open roles, according to a Thursday memo to employees.

Meta’s latest layoffs follow several smaller job reductions that the enterprise remarked was necessary to improve efficiency while focusing on generative AI. This also touches on aspects of portfolio.

Meta plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, about 8,000 employees, as it continues ramping up investments in artificial intelligence.

The cuts will begin May 20, and the corporation is scrapping plans to hire individuals for 6,000 open roles, according to a Thursday memo to employees. Bloomberg was first to report on the layoffs.

Meta’s latest round of cuts follows several smaller job reductions that the business mentioned was necessary to to improve efficiency while focusing its efforts on generative AI, where it’s lagged OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

CNBC reported in January that Meta fired about 10% of employees who were working on metaverse-related projects. Roughly 1,000 citizens in the company’s Reality Labs unit were let go at that time.

Another round of layoffs commenced in March and affected hundreds of employees working in a variety of units, including Facebook, Reality Labs, global operations and sales. Meta also noted last month that it would shift away from third-party vendors and contractors, which have historically handled content moderation tasks, in favor of relying on various AI technologies.

Job cuts are picking up across the tech sector as companies reckon with the AI boom. Microsoft confirmed on Thursday that it will offer voluntary buyouts to some U.S. employees, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn’t being made public. 

In January, Amazon announced plans to eliminate about 16,000 corporate jobs, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October.

Meta commented in its latest annual report in January that it had a global workforce of 78,865 employees as of Dec. 31, down from 86,482 in late 2022 coming off a wave of hiring throughout the tech industry in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. The business stated in a 2021 annual report that its global workforce reached 58,604 employees as of Dec. 31, 2020.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s top effort is to bolster his company’s position in AI. Earlier this month, Meta debuted its first major artificial intelligence model since the costly hiring of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang in June.

This week Meta revealed to staff that it’s using a recent employee tracking tool called the Model Capability Initiative, intended to capture data from staff members using their work computers. The data, which includes employee keystrokes and mouse clicks, is needed to train AI agents, a Meta spokesperson commented in a statement.

Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings Wednesday, along with fellow tech giants Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.

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