Mark Zuckerberg believes that layoffs in 2024 have nothing to do with artificial intelligence. Your competitors say otherwise.

The Facebook founder had a very busy weekend. He initially became a meme after his bizarre appearance in an MMA world title fight involving his friend and training partner Alexander Volkanovsek. Later he became a guest on Podcast'Daily morning drink' He offered his perspective on the recent layoffs in big tech.

Epidemic fever. Meta's CEO said in his interview that most of the layoffs that occurred in recent years were actually the result of post-epidemic adjustments, but it is not an economic crisis for companies. “I think during this period of time, companies have been surfing the COVID-19 wave during the pandemic,” Mark Zuckerberg said.

According to the millionaire, e-commerce soared in the first months of 2020, causing record income in selling online advertising, affecting all technology companies in a shock wave. As people return to stores, online advertising revenues return to previous levels.

In 2023 the size was adjusted. During the “boom” years of online sales, companies, including Meta, expanded their workforces to respond to this demand. When everything returned to normal, the companies' workforce doubled, but they have now regained their pre-pandemic income again. This has caused massive rounds of layoffs that will occur between 2022 and 2023.

“Obviously it's been very difficult, we've lost a lot of talented people that we cared about. But in some ways, being more efficient makes the company more efficient.

In 2024 it is for agility. Since Mark Zuckerberg did his thing “Year of Efficiency” Statement Meta seemed to have found its way and shareholders responded with record high prices in the company's stock.

During 2023, Meta got rid of several layers in management levels, and now what Mark Zuckerberg's company is looking for is to restructure the company to become more flexible and efficient for the future. “First it was hypergrowth, then common sense told us we should do the best job we could by downsizing the company to make it more efficient.”

Not because of AI, but because of AI. Zuckerberg did not want to take a clear position on whether the reason for the restructuring that many companies have recently begun is the strategy for developing artificial intelligence. “It's possible. For us at least, AI hasn't been a big factor in that.”

However, technology companies such as Google, Amazon or IBM have explicitly stated that their recent layoffs were not because these employees would be replaced by AI, but rather because they were restructuring managements to focus their investments on developing AI for their products. . At the same time, these same companies reported the end of the year with significant profits, which rules out economic reasons for the layoffs.

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