Zuckerberg says Meta made 'mistakes' in AI workforce shift

By Katie Paul

June 12 (Reuters) - Meta ‌CEO Mark Zuckerberg ​has told ​employees that the social media giant has made mistakes in its AI transformation of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by ‌Reuters.

Zuckerberg is pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into AI as he ⁠seeks to reshape his company's inner workings around the technology, reflecting a broader pattern among major U.S. ‌companies this year, particularly in the ‌tech sector.

In the memo, Zuckerberg describes the rapid advances in AI and the challenges brought on by the boom in the technology.

"Given the complexity of these changes, ​we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," Zuckerberg said, adding that he is also "focused on providing as much stability as possible" in terms of organization ⁠changes going forward.

"I don't want to overpromise because the world is changing in ways that are out of our ​control," he said, reiterating that Meta does not expect more company-wide layoffs this year.

He said Meta will try to find new roles for ​employees reassigned to train AI models, after the ‌Facebook owner carried out a massive restructuring in May, laying off 10% of its workforce globally and transferring 7,000 employees to new ⁠initiatives related to AI workflows.

"By creating important new roles for people, this also allowed us to shrink the size of teams knowing that if we make mistakes in some places, then we ⁠could transfer some people back," Zuckerberg said.

Meta declined to comment on the memo when contacted by Reuters.

The ​company plans to increase investment in team-building initiatives, Zuckerberg said, including higher budgets for offsites and corporate events, and is organizing a large-scale hackathon in July to foster cross-team collaboration and development on ‌its latest models.

Zuckerberg said Meta has taken note of concerns over the widening of manager oversight responsibilities and plans to scale ‌back the practice.

Meta's new Applied AI Engineering unit reportedly had a flat structure with up to ⁠50:1 ratio of individual contributors to ‌managers.

In April, Meta raised its ​annual capital spending forecast to between $125 billion and $145 billion.

(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by ‌Arun Koyyur)

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