By Katie Paul
NEW YORK, April 30 (Reuters) - Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg attributed the Facebook parent's planned layoffs to increased capital spending for AI, and declined to rule out further job cuts, in comments to employees at a company town hall on Thursday.
“We basically have two major cost centers in the company: compute infrastructure and people-oriented things," Zuckerberg said in the session, heard by Reuters.
"If we’re investing more in one area to serve our community, then that
means we have less capital to allocate to the other. So that means we do need to take down the size of the company somewhat,” he said.
The workforce cuts were unrelated to Meta's reorganization of teams around a new "AI native" structure and efforts to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, Zuckerberg added.
The company's silence on the layoffs amid announcements about the AI-oriented organizational "transformation," as well as a new initiative to track employees' mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to train AI agents, has sparked outrage among Meta employees.
In some cases, staffers have openly criticized Zuckerberg and other company leaders on Meta's internal message forum over the changes, according to copies of the comments viewed by Reuters.
"Getting everyone internally to use AI tools and getting to do the work more efficiently is not the thing that's driving layoffs," Zuckerberg told staffers, although he added that "we'll see how all this stuff trends" and said the company would "be able to share more soon."
The session on Thursday marked the first time Zuckerberg has addressed employees directly about the layoffs since Reuters first reported the plan in March.
Meta intends to lay off about 10% of its workforce on May 20 and is planning additional cuts for the second half of the year.
Zuckerberg and other executives have confirmed the May layoffs but declined to speak to any plans beyond that.
"I wish that I can tell you that I have a crystal ball plan for the next, like, three years of how all this stuff is going to play out. I don't. I don't think anyone does," he said.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Chris Reese and David Gregorio)
