People are increasingly less welcome here: company logo in front of the Meta headquarters.Image: keystone
The Facebook group Meta is massively cutting jobs in order to have money to invest in artificial intelligence. Are these the first tremors of a big earthquake?
04/26/2026, 07:0804/26/2026, 07:08
Raffael Schuppisser / ch media
If you want to understand what dark development the AI revolution can take, you don’t have to look to the future, but to meta. The Facebook Group is already showing how technology is replacing work – and how the remaining employees are faring. The group recently announced that it would cut ten percent of its workforce, which corresponds to 8,000 jobs. They are no longer needed – or rather, the wages saved are urgently needed to build data centers and pay the electricity bill.
Meta is not an isolated case. There are also major job cuts at other companies. Microsoft is putting seven percent of its 125,000 jobs in the USA at risk, and Amazon has already cut 16,000 jobs. According to reports, massive cuts are also planned at Oracle. Overall, so has that British magazine Economist countedaround 73,000 jobs have been saved in the tech industry this year alone.
Other places are also busy converting for AI. Nevertheless, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is particularly uncompromising. Artificial intelligence is now looking closely over the shoulders of the remaining employees. Software registers every mouse click and every keystroke. The purpose of this de facto total surveillance, which would not be legal in Switzerland: The aim is for artificial intelligence to better understand what people are doing in order to take over their work in the future.
It seems paradoxical that the tech companies that develop AI are among the first to feel its consequences. Yesterday’s winners of digitalization are the first to experience its disruptive mechanisms today. However, upon closer inspection, this seems logical. Programming languages have a strictly logical structure – language models such as ChatGPT or Claude cope particularly well with this.
In addition, the AI programmers understand their job best. This understanding helps to train the AI accordingly. And AI companies have a great interest in training artificial intelligence to become a programming genius in order to further optimize their own models. OpenAI recently said that ChatGPT is now significantly involved in its own development. And Dario Amodei, the CEO of rival Anthropic, says that AI now writes “a large part of the code” in his company itself.
Dario Amodei is the head of Anthropic.Image: keystone
The AI revolution is first happening in the headquarters of tech companies. But it is expanding to other industries. There are two reasons for this. First, US tech companies are taking a particularly radical approach and are further implementing AI applications into their structures. Secondly, the models are becoming increasingly better thanks to their self-optimization and are therefore also suitable for more complex work. Basically, what can be digitized and measured can also be automated. And what can be automated will be automated sooner or later.
How to deal with this AI revolution without monitoring employees and reducing them to mere training material is the crucial question. There is still no convincing answer to this. The only thing that is certain is that what is visible today at Meta will soon spread far beyond the tech industry. (aargauerzeitung.ch)