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Meta chopped 600 employees from its Meta Superintelligence Labs group this week. Google is removing managers again. Broadcom cut staff recently, too.
These 3 companies have one thing in common: They are growing quickly and minting money from the AI boom. So why are they still shedding employees?
I asked Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology. He’s been analyzing the tech industry for decades.
“The Meta cuts are a perfect example of AI working too well not failing. These aren’t demand-driven layoffs; they’re the result of a massive internal restructuring as AI changes the cost structure of tech itself.”
This is perfectly illustrated by another scoop this week from Business Insider’s Jyoti Mann. She reported that Meta executive Michel Port recently told some employees that their jobs were being replaced by new automated processes.
Here’s the rest of Brad’s take, edited for clarity and length:
“In Meta’s case, it looks like a consolidation and reprioritization issue. Meta has hundreds of separate AI initiatives spanning Llama, infrastructure, content moderation, recommendation systems, and ad optimization. The 600 jobs being cut are largely from overlapping research or support teams as Meta shifts from “AI research mode” to “AI productization mode.” Once the models are trained and deployed, you simply don’t need the same headcount to maintain that velocity, especially when internal tools are now automating much of the work engineers used to do manually.
Think of it like the moment after an airplane reaches cruising altitude: you need fewer hands in the cockpit. The heavy lift training, data labeling, model architecture is done. Now the focus is on efficiency, inference, and monetization.
More broadly, all the major AI players — Meta, Google, Microsoft, Broadcom — are demonstrating the same pattern. They’re investing billions in infrastructure while trimming the human layers that are being displaced by those very systems. It’s not layoffs because business is bad; it’s because AI is doing exactly what it promised: automating middle-tier technical and operational roles.
If the industrial revolution replaced muscle, AI is replacing repetition and coordination. It’s not that Meta or Google suddenly need fewer ideas; they just need fewer people to execute them.”
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