Mark Zuckerberg, head of the Meta group that owns Facebook, announced yesterday the layoffs of more than 11,000 employees, and he shared a message with employees that indicated that those working in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning may be spared the brunt of the layoffs.
“We have shifted more of our resources into a number of high-priority growth areas, such as the AI-driven content discovery engine, the advertising sector, and business platforms, as well as our long-term vision for Metaverse,” Zuckerberg said in his letter.
However; Today ( Thomas Ahle ), a research scientist at Meta, who was dismissed from his job, posted a tweet via Twitter, saying: “He and the entire research organization called (Probability), which focused on applying machine learning techniques across infrastructure, has dismissed.”
Thomas added, “The (Probability) team had 50 members; They are divided into 19 people doing Bayesian models of probability, 9 people doing ratings and recommendations, 5 people making machine learning efficiency monitoring models for improvement, 17 people designing compilation models for AI, as well as managers and others.”
Another team member, Emily McMillen, the team’s chief software engineer, also responded by tweeting, “It took about 7 years at META to find such an amazing team as Probability, and it’s sad that the journey ends here.”
In his letter to employees that came just a few weeks after Meta shares plunged — following the third-quarter earnings announcement — Zuckerberg indicated that he is in the midst of a comprehensive review of infrastructure spending.
He wrote: “As we build the AI infrastructure, we are focused on becoming more efficient, and our infrastructure will continue to be an important feature in Meta, and I believe we can achieve that with less spending.”
According to the Probability team’s webpage, the team’s mission is to make it easier for engineers to adopt machine learning technologies by integrating deep machine learning into Facebook’s programming languages, developer tools, and infrastructure.
It is worth noting that Zuckerberg considered layoffs “the most difficult changes in the history of the company”, and he attributed the reason for this to the repercussions of the Corona pandemic, and the economic downturn.
In his letter yesterday, he announced compensation for the dismissed employees, where they will receive financial compensation of 4 months of their salaries, in addition to a two-month salary for each year of work in the company, without a maximum compensation limit.
He added that the dismissed employees will receive financial allowances for their vacation days that they did not get, in addition to receiving their annual share of the company’s shares as annual incentives, which they can obtain in November of each year while providing three months of job support with one of the company’s partners. This also includes giving employees dismissed from Meta the advantage of early access to job vacancies.
It is reported that the Meta Group, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reported that its total number of employees reached 87,000 last September.
Since the beginning of this year, the group has been in an unprecedented state of confusion, as the company has lost more than 70% of its value since Zuckerberg announced the change of his company’s name to Meta with a focus on building metaverses. At the beginning of this month, Meta shares fell 24% after submitting its quarterly earnings report, reaching its lowest level in nearly four years after an earnings report described by a Wall Street analyst as disastrous.
It also previously announced the loss of half a million users via Facebook, and the matter evolved into a continuous decline in advertisers’ budgets, in addition to the impact of Apple’s new policies on protecting the privacy of its users’ data that affected the mobile advertising sector in an unprecedented way, which cost Facebook more than 10 billion losses. dollar.
Despite all this, Mark Zuckerberg insists on increasing investment in the Metaverse project and spending billions on it while investors oppose him.
