What A Twist! Meta Saving $3B on Humans, Spending $145B on AI!

Meta, the parent company for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has created an absolute sensation in the job market by firing 8000 workers today.

This is regarded as one of the biggest layoff by any major companies and recent history terms of numbers. But the shocking thing is that the company is firing these workers to save little on financial front while investing multiple times more on AI intervention.

Analysts say firing these 8,000 people will save Meta around $3 billion a year. That sounds like a lot but in reality, Mark Zuckerberg has been writing much bigger checks for AI hires. Last summer he paid an ex-Apple engineer named Ruoming Pang $200 million to come work on AI.

The same week Meta laid off 8,000 office workers, the company is still planning to spend somewhere between $125 and $145 billion this year on AI data centers and the chips to run them.

Two days before the layoffs began, Meta picked 7,000 of the survivors and moved them onto brand new AI teams. The people getting hit in this round are mostly engineers and product managers. Another wave is already planned for later this year.

It is shocking to see mega companies like Meta spending so much money on AI infrastructure, while categorically sizing down their human workforce who cost a fraction of this expenditure.