Meta's scrapped plan to go AI native would have cut teams 60%

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Meta reportedly drew up a genuinely aggressive internal plan called Project OT that would have reshaped huge parts of the company around AI, and then quietly shelved most of it. The idea was to make Meta AI native rather than just bolting AI tools onto existing workflows. Some teams were reportedly looked at for cuts as steep as sixty percent, with small human groups left to supervise AI agents doing the bulk of the actual work. Zuckerberg apparently developed the concept with senior executives during a leadership retreat earlier this year

The plan wasn't purely about layoffs either. It also covered redeployments, freezing vacant roles, and pushing out staff considered lower performers, with the savings meant to go toward paying top AI engineering talent even more. That's a pretty blunt statement about where the company's priorities were heading

Executives reportedly looked at how AI native startups in Asia had structured their teams and ran pilot projects internally to test whether a similar approach could work at Meta's scale. After an initial wave of cuts employee pushback grew loud enough that Zuckerberg apparently paused plans for a second round entirely. Doubts about whether the productivity gains were actually showing up yet seem to have played a role too

This lands right in the middle of a broader pattern across big tech this year where AI efficiency gets used as the public justification for workforce reductions. Amazon and several other major companies have made similar moves recently, often citing AI directly in the reasoning. Meta pulling back partway through suggests the AI native vision might be running ahead of what the technology can actually deliver reliably right now

Hard to know if this is a genuine pause or just a delay until the internal pushback quiets down. Either way it's a pretty rare admission that an ambitious AI reorg plan didn't survive first contact with actual employees

AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made "large-scale, disruptive actions"arstechnica.com