Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Meta made a mistake when shifting personnel’

In an internal memo okay Reuters collected this week, Mark Zuckerberg describes the rapid progress of AI and the challenges this technology brings. “Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” Zuckerberg told employees. He also said that he is “focusing on bringing the greatest stability possible” with changes in organizational structure in the near future.

“I don’t want to promise too much because the world is changing in ways that are beyond our control,” Zuckerberg shared, reiterating that Meta is not expected to conduct any more large-scale layoffs this year.

The company will also try to find new roles for employees transferred to train AI models after a major restructuring in May. At that time, Meta laid off 10% of its employees globally and transferred 7,000 employees to new AI-related projects.

“When we create important new roles for people, we can shrink the size of teams. If we make a mistake somewhere, we can move some people back to their old positions,” Zuckerberg said.

According to the internal memo, Meta plans to increase investment in team building, including increasing the budget for trips and events, and organizing a large-scale hackathon technology development competition in July to promote collaboration between teams and build new models.

Zuckerberg said Meta also noted concerns regarding the expansion of manager oversight responsibilities and plans to narrow them. According to sources, Meta’s new Applied AI Engineering department has a “flat structure”, with few middle layers, with each manager in charge of up to 50 employees.

Theo ReutersZuckerberg is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI to restructure Meta’s internal operations to suit this technology. This is also the general trend of many large businesses in the US this year, especially in the technology sector.

A survey by consulting firm Mercer last month showed that most business leaders want to restructure to integrate AI, leading to layoffs. Tom’s Hardware said that the survey was conducted with the participation of 12,000 people, including 9,250 employees, 1,650 human resource managers, 825 senior business leaders and 100 investors.

Accordingly, up to 98% of senior leaders said they were planning to change the company structure, and 99% predicted AI would lead to staff cuts in the next two years. A majority of leaders also believe redesigning jobs to integrate AI and automation will bring the highest profits, while only 32% rate their workforce as being able to optimally combine human and machine capabilities.