Two years ago, after the multibillion-dollar disaster known as the Metaverse failed to take off, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed confidence that pivoting to artificial intelligence was the future of Facebook’s parent company. In October 2024, he said that Meta’s AI wing could “accelerate our core business” for a “strong ROI over the next few years.” That summer, in a blog post titled “Open Source AI Is the Path Forward,” he wrote that he was confident that its large-language model would soon “become the most advanced in the industry.”

Despite already slashing jobs tied to its Metaverse ambitions, the company is making even deeper cuts this week as it restructures to keep pace with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — and the staff is, understandably, freaked out. On Wednesday, around 8,000 employees will be informed at 4 a.m. local time that they no longer have jobs. An additional 6,000........

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