This week, Meta made a striking move by releasing approximately 600 employees from its Meta Superintelligence Labs division — a significant restructuring within one of the company’s most advanced AI-focused units. The decision echoes similar trends across the tech landscape, as Google once again eliminates layers of management, and Broadcom conducts another round of workforce reductions. Although these companies may appear to be tightening their belts, a closer look reveals an entirely different story: all three organizations are currently expanding at a rapid pace and reaping immense profits fueled by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence technologies. The question naturally arises — why would corporations at the peak of success and innovation voluntarily downsize their staff rather than expand their human resources?
To unpack this paradox, I spoke with Brad Gastwirth, the global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a veteran industry analyst who has spent decades examining the complex mechanisms that drive the evolution of the technology sector. Gastwirth explained that Meta’s internal cuts illustrate not a failure of artificial intelligence, but the opposite — a profound demonstration of AI’s efficacy. According to him, these workforce reductions are not responses to diminishing demand or weakening financial conditions. Instead, they represent the inevitable consequences of a massive internal restructuring prompted by AI’s transformative impact on the cost structure of technology development itself. In essence, as AI systems become more capable, efficient, and autonomous, they begin to perform tasks once handled by human engineers, researchers, and support specialists, thereby reducing the need for as many employees.
This dynamic was further emphasized in an exclusive report by Business Insider’s Jyoti Mann earlier in the week. She revealed that Michel Port, a senior Meta executive, informed certain employees that their positions would be replaced by newly implemented automated processes. Such announcements embody the very essence of Gastwirth’s observation — that AI is not only reshaping business products but also redefining how work is organized and executed at a fundamental operational level.
Gastwirth elaborated that, within Meta’s particular context, these layoffs reflect a combination of consolidation, reprioritization, and strategic refinement. Meta currently operates hundreds of distinct AI programs — everything from Llama, its leading large language model initiative, to areas like infrastructure enhancement, content moderation algorithms, recommendation systems, and advertising optimization tools. The 600 roles slated for reduction, he noted, largely originate from teams whose research efforts overlap or whose support functions have become redundant. The company is transitioning from an era of exploratory AI research, where innovation and experimentation required large, specialized teams, to an era focused on productization — the process of turning research models into fully integrated, scalable products. Once models reach maturity, having been trained and deployed across Meta’s platforms, the company no longer needs the same volume of personnel to sustain its development pace, especially as internal tools powered by AI begin automating many of the routine or repetitive engineering tasks that previously demanded manual attention.
Gastwirth compared this shift to a moment in aviation: after an aircraft ascends to cruising altitude, the intense workload required during takeoff diminishes, and fewer hands are needed to maintain flight. The strenuous phases — such as data labeling, training massive models, and designing complex architectures — have largely been completed. The organization’s focus now shifts to maintaining efficiency, ensuring high-quality inference, and generating monetization strategies that extract tangible economic value from these advanced models.
Viewed more broadly, this evolution is not unique to Meta. It represents a pronounced trend sweeping across all major players in the artificial intelligence landscape — including titans like Google, Microsoft, and Broadcom. Each company continues to pour billions of dollars into developing and refining large-scale infrastructure while simultaneously streamlining managerial and technical layers that AI technologies themselves now render obsolete. These workforce adjustments should not be mistaken for contractions driven by failure or financial hardship; rather, they signify the success of automation fulfilling its very promise: to optimize processes by automating middle-tier technical operations and coordination roles that once demanded significant human oversight.
Gastwirth summarized the transformation with a compelling analogy. Just as the Industrial Revolution diminished humanity’s reliance on muscle power by introducing mechanized labor, the AI revolution is now replacing the need for repetitive, coordination-based cognitive tasks. The world’s leading technology companies are not running short on ideas or innovation; if anything, their creative ambitions continue to expand. What has changed is the mechanism of execution — AI empowers these enterprises to realize their visions with smaller, more efficient human teams, while intelligent systems assume the bulk of the operational burden. In short, as artificial intelligence matures, it is not eliminating work but rather reshaping the very nature of how work is performed and who — or what — performs it.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-giants-keep-axing-tech-jobs-layoffs-2025-10
