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CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI tools now let individual Meta employees do work that once required large teams.
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It plans to boost AI spending by between 60% and 87% this year as output per engineer continues to rise.
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Despite computing constraints, Meta said it is looking to hire top AI talent.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that AI is transforming what one employee can accomplish in the company, and indicates that it is adopting a new hiring strategy.
On an earnings call with analysts on Thursday, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the company is investing in more native AI tools to elevate individual contributors and flatten teams. The effort is being somewhat constrained, however, by a lack of computational resources.
“We are starting to see projects that used to require large teams now being carried out by one very talented person,” he said. “I want to make sure that as many of these very talented people as possible choose Meta as the place where they can make the biggest impact.”
The parent of Facebook and Instagram, which reported fourth-quarter revenue and earnings that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, said it plans to increase AI spending by between 60% and 87% this year. When she also said that she has already seen a significant increase in production per engineer last year, with the majority of that growth coming from the adoption of coding agents.
Although teams are on track to get smaller, chief financial officer Susan Li said on the earnings call that the company is still hungry for top talent. “This remains a very competitive rental market, but we want to invest aggressively where we can,” she said.
Li also noted that Meta closed the quarter ending in December with 6% more employees than it had a year earlier, driven by hiring in areas such as monetization, infrastructure, Meta Superintelligence Labs, regulation and compliance.
When he is not alone he focuses on small teams. The strategy has become popular in the startup world, where founders have long prioritized scrappiness. It’s a trend that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted will take off in February 2024.
“We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon,” he said at the time. “In my small group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting group for the first year there’s a one-person billion dollar company, which would have been unthinkable without AI. And now [it] it will happen.”
Meanwhile, large companies have been reducing their middle manager ranks in recent years to boost efficiency by cutting red tape, including Amazon and Intel. Zuckerberg of Meta wrote a memo in 2023 entitled “Flatter is faster”, and in late 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff that the company would reduce the roles of vice president and manager by 10% as part of an efficiency drive.