Mark Zuckerberg, seen here at the LlamaCon 2025 developers conference, believes AI will dramatically transform the world of work. (Photo: picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS | Jeff Chiu)

Meta slashes 8,000 jobs as AI replaces human roles by 2025

Meta's planned layoffs of nearly 8,000 employees are a sign of the times: artificial intelligence is replacing human jobs in Silicon Valley, the cradle of tech innovation. Back in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg already signaled where things were headed. He declared that 2026 would be the year when AI begins to "dramatically" reshape how we work, marveling that "projects that once required large teams can now be handled by a single, highly skilled individual."

Four Weeks of Uncertainty

Even then, the question arose: What would this mean for jobs? Now we have the answer: On May 20, roughly one in ten Meta employees will be let go. Additionally, about 6,000 already vacant positions will remain unfilled.

But it's only April—and employees now face four agonizing weeks of uncertainty, not knowing who will keep their jobs and who will be shown the door. In an email to staff obtained by Bloomberg, Chief People Officer Janelle Gale acknowledged that the situation was "incredibly draining." However, she explained that the company had been forced to disclose its still-unfinalized plans after details leaked.

Minders for AI Agents

Artificial intelligence has long been adept at writing software, giving companies the opportunity to cut programming jobs. Code that once required human hands is now increasingly generated by AI, with employees left only to review it. At Google, for example, recent reports indicate that 75 percent of newly produced code already comes from AI tools.

The next step is so-called AI agents—software capable of autonomously completing tasks, even complex sequences of them. In a second internal email reported by The Wall Street Journal, Meta's Chief Technology Officer and Zuckerberg confidant Andrew Bosworth outlined the company's vision for the future, writing that AI agents would handle the bulk of the work. The role of human employees, he said, would be to "guide, review, and help them improve."

Mass Layoffs at Payment Service

Hardly a week goes by in Silicon Valley these days without another round of job cuts—usually numbering in the hundreds. But two months before Meta's announcement, payment services provider Block, co-founded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey, made sweeping cuts of its own: more than 4,000 of its 10,000 employees were let go.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Dorsey insisted that financial troubles were not the reason for the mass layoffs. Business was growing, he said, and becoming more profitable. "But something has changed." He explained that AI tools, combined with smaller teams, were enabling "a new way of working" that fundamentally alters how companies are built and run.

Dorsey went even further, predicting that within a year, "the majority of companies" would reach the same conclusion and implement similar structural changes.

Meta, meanwhile, justified its layoffs by citing a push for greater efficiency and the need to offset expenses. The company is currently pouring vast resources into AI infrastructure, with capital investments for this year alone projected between $115 billion and $135 billion (€98.44 billion to €115.56 billion).

Just days ago, Meta made headlines again after an internal memo circulated online, warning employees to expect their computer activity to be recorded by software—so that future AI models can learn from it.