Meta plans massive AI‑era layoffs
Meta is preparing what could be the largest layoffs in its history—potentially over 15,000 roles—as it scrambles to rein in tens of billions in AI infrastructure spending and “prepare for the efficiency” of AI-driven work, and its new LLM “Avocado” was delayed to May after underperforming internal benchmarks reported. This isn’t just headcount trimming—sources say Meta is even weighing temporary licensing of Google’s Gemini while it fixes model gaps in reasoning and coding, underscoring how costly and brittle large LLM stacks remain reported.
Meta could cut about 20% of its staff, which would affect roughly 15,800 roles given the company’s ~79,000 employees, Reuters reported finance.yahoo.com. Meta pushed Avocado’s debut from March to at least May after The New York Times reported internal tests showing the model trails top systems on reasoning, coding and writing tasks nytimes.com, and Reuters found Avocado currently scores between Google’s Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 3 on benchmark comparisons finance.yahoo.com. Company leaders have discussed a temporary licensing arrangement to run Google’s Gemini in select Meta products while Avocado is improved, according to The New York Times’ reporting on internal deliberations nytimes.com. Meta’s move comes as it plans a record 2026 capital expenditure program of $115–135 billion to build AI data centers and related infrastructure, and it recently agreed to deploy multi‑gigawatt AMD gear as part of that buildout, Bloomberg reported the hardware deal at roughly “double‑digit” billions and a 6‑gigawatt deployment scale datacenterdynamics.com.
