Zuckerberg: AI now lets one Meta employee do work that once needed large teams

On an earnings call Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said AI tools are enabling individual employees to accomplish projects that previously required large teams, and the company is investing in more AI-native tools to elevate individual contributors. Meta, which reported fourth-quarter revenue and earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations, plans to boost AI spending by roughly 70% this year.

The company also said output per engineer rose significantly last year, with the majority of that growth coming from the adoption of agentic coding. The shift toward smaller teams is being constrained by a shortage of compute resources, Meta acknowledged, as demand across the company has increased faster than its supply.

Zuckerberg said, "We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person." Despite teams trending smaller, finance chief Susan Li said Meta is still seeking top talent. Li told analysts it remains a "very competitive hiring market," but the company wants to "invest aggressively where we can," and it ended the quarter with about 6% more employees than a year earlier, driven by hires in monetization, infrastructure, Meta Superintelligence Labs, regulation, and compliance.

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