April 24, 2026, 10:46April 24, 2026, 10:46
The planned layoff of almost 8,000 employees at the Facebook group Meta is a sign of the times: Artificial intelligence is replacing human jobs in the tech cradle of Silicon Valley.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg already signaled in January where the journey was headed. 2026 is the year in which AI will begin to “dramatically” change the way we work. You can see that “projects that previously required a large team are now carried out by a single, very talented person,” enthused the Facebook founder.
Mark Zuckerberg is enthusiastic about artificial intelligence.Image: keystone
Four weeks of uncertainty
Even back then, that raised the question: What could this mean for jobs? Now comes the answer: Around one in ten employees at Meta will be laid off on May 20th. In addition, around 6,000 vacant positions will not be filled.
However, it’s only April – and the workforce faces around four weeks of agonizing uncertainty about who can keep the job and who has to leave. This was “incredibly stressful,” admitted human resources manager Janelle Gale in an email to employees. But after leaks, the plans that had not yet been finalized had to be announced.
AI agent minder
Artificial intelligence has been good at writing software for a while now. This opens up the opportunity for companies to save on programmer jobs. Software code that humans used to type is now increasingly generated by AI. The only job of the employees is to control. At Google, for example, according to recent information, 75 percent of the newly produced program code comes from AI tools.
The next step is so-called AI agents: software that can independently carry out tasks – including sequences of them. In a second meta-email, reported by the Wall Street Journal, technical director and Zuckerberg confidant Andrew Bosworth wrote that it contained the vision for the future of the company. The AI agents should do most of the work. The role of human employees is to “guide them, test them and help them improve,” the newspaper quoted the email as saying.
Clearcutting with paid service
Hardly a week goes by in Silicon Valley without the announcement of job cuts – usually in the order of a few hundred jobs. But around two months before the meta announcement, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s payment service provider Block resorted to cuts: more than 4,000 of the previous 10,000 employees had to leave.
“Something has changed”
The mass layoffs were not triggered by financial problems, Dorsey wrote at the time on the Twitter successor service X. The business was growing and becoming more profitable. “But something has changed.” You can see that AI tools in interaction with smaller teams enable a “new way of working” that fundamentally changes how you build and run a company.
Dorsey went even further, predicting that within a year “the majority of companies” would come to such conclusions and initiate similar structural changes.
At Meta, meanwhile, the reason for the layoffs was that they wanted to make the company more efficient and offset expenses. Meta is currently investing heavily in infrastructure for artificial intelligence. For this year alone, capital investments of between 115 billion and 135 billion US dollars (90.4 billion to 106.13 billion francs) were promised.
Meta has already been in the headlines in the past few days because an internal announcement spread online that employees of the company must prepare for their computer use to be recorded by software – so that future AI models can learn from it. (hkl/sda/awp/dpa)