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CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI tools now let individual meta-employees do jobs that once required large teams.
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Meta plans to increase AI spending by between 60% and 87% this year as output per engineer continues to rise.
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Despite the compute constraints, Meta said it is looking to hire top AI talent.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that AI is transforming what a single employee can achieve at a company, indicating that it is adopting a new recruiting strategy.
On an earnings call with analysts Thursday, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the company is investing in more AI-native tools to elevate individual contributors and flatten teams. However, the effort is somewhat limited by the lack of computational resources.
“Projects that used to require large teams are now being completed by a single very talented person,” he said. “I want to make sure that as many of these talented people as possible choose Meta as the place where they can make the biggest impact.”
The Facebook and Instagram parent, which reported fourth-quarter revenue and earnings below Wall Street’s expectations, plans to increase AI spending between 60% and 87% this year. Meta also said it has seen significant growth in output per engineer over the past year, with the majority of that growth coming from the adoption of agentic coding.
Although teams are on track to get smaller, finance chief Susan Lee said on the earnings call that the company is still hungry for top talent. “It’s become a very competitive recruiting market, but we want to invest aggressively where we can,” she said.
Lee also noted that Meta closed the December-end quarter with 6% more employees than a year ago, driven by hiring in areas such as monetization, infrastructure, Meta Superintelligence Lab, regulation, and compliance.
Meta is not alone in focusing on smaller teams. This strategy has become popular in the startup world, where founders have long preferred scrappyness. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted a return 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 chats with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year, there’s a one-man billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will be.”
Meanwhile, big companies, including Amazon and Intel in recent years, have been thinning their middle managers to increase efficiency by cutting red tape. Meta’s Zuckerberg wrote a memo in 2023 titled “Flair is Faster,” and in late 2024, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees the company was cutting vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of an efficiency push.
