Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI

reuters.com

64 pointsT-zex18 comments

Users are 60% bots, no reason staff shouldn't match those numbers.

AI is just confirming what was known by some but not by those who make decisions...you don't need thousands of coders to run a website.

It's coming for us all.. sooner or later.

And who is going to pay the bills for that?

No AI companies were able to make profit so far, and unemployed masses surely won't buy expensive ChatGPT subscriptions.

Will AI labs make profit from AI using companies? Hardly, unemployed masses can't and won't buy their products either, therefore they won't be able to afford even more expensive ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions. (For crying out loud, even big corps like Uber can't pay all their AI bills.)

And if AI labs have no profits, how are they supposed to pay the hyperscalers for computing capacity? They will run out of investor money pretty soon.

And if hyperscalers can't rent out their data centers to AI labs, how are they supposed to pay for the electricity (gas/diesel/etc.) and water bills and repay their already enormous debts?

I honestly don't see how replacing all workers with AI could be profitable at all.

I do not disagree with you, but I think they will try to do it anyway

yea that's kind of the crux in this whole mess we are in:

It doesn't really matter how right or wrong anyone is... They are driving and we are along for the ride.

A few are deciding to take a massive, extremely risky bet on behalf of the entire world population. And of course they are the ones insulated from any potential disaster

Meta is planning to use their own AI to replace their workers. They are spending hundreds of billions of datacenters. If they cut 30,000 workers thats around 15 billion a year in savings. Once their own workers are replaced they plan to sell their AI agents to small businesses for use on their platforms.

Thats what the article is about, and how that backfired

The article just shows it was too early in May 2026.

so mark's gonna try again next year

There are a sizeable number of Meta employees that have jobs due to Zuck’s sheer generosity and the fact that he cares about his public image and laying them off in service of Meta’s bottom line won’t look good.

Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now, of course macroeconomic conditions have changed but layoffs were always a bit taboo in tech.

To all the sheep at Meta who weren’t sacrificed because Zuck thought it would look too bad on him, how do you know your game is up at Meta ?

>>Elon firing half of Twitter just normalized layoffs to such an extent that it’s considered par for the course now

The site was broken for eternity after that, but people continued to use it as it was the only source of real time news. In many ways its not the old Twitter at all.

Now the head counts dont even matter because its all agents writing the code, reviewing the code, and deploying the code.

The Elon X layoffs are instructive in the difference between Twitter run as a public company vs as private (or buried in another company's balance sheet)

In a public company, you need financial growth. You need 75% of employees to be developing towards a promising new future. In a private company, with no real growth goals, you can get by with 25% and keep things running and basically the same.

You can argue whether Twitter's extra 75% actually was effective at driving growth the stock market likes, but its hard to argue against needing more staff to drive at least a perception that investments are happening in bold new product directions.

Twitter had 0 product growth for like a decade before elon tookover. If 75% of their staff was working on product growth it's hard to say they didnt deserve to be laid off.

Sounds like cargo cult approach to engineering management (to use Feynman's metaphor). It's interesting to see that even Meta is subject to this. When I worked at IBM (round about 2014), management decided to adopt the Spotify organizational system with squads, tribes and guilds - but nothing really changed. We still wrote code much the same way and delivered at the same rate. Except with more organizational overhead.

The early dot com billionaires have so much money that they can keep making brain-dead decisions and get away with it - they have money printers to save them.

Their companies perfected the addiction/extraction economy.

Keyword there being 'had'?

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