Brazilian jiu-jitsu blue belt Mark Zuckerberg hit his staff with a guillotine choke Tuesday, telling low performers at his social media giant Meta to expect a pink slip.

In an internal memo, Zuckerberg said he plans to cut 5% of the company’s workforce for “performance” reasons and “bring new people in” to replace them. It’s the latest in several moves — announced in swift succession — that suggest a radical overhaul in his thinking about the company.

Culture Change

Last week, Zuckerberg said fact-checking on Meta’s US platforms — which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — will soon be a verified thing of the past. The company also axed several diversity and inclusion initiatives, following similar moves at Walmart, McDonald’s, Boeing, Toyota and several other big name firms across industries in recent months.

In a shakeup near the top, Zuckerberg appointed UFC CEO Dana White, a key ally of President-elect Donald Trump, to Meta’s board and tapped former Republican political operative Joel Kaplan to act as the company’s president of global affairs. Meta is also chipping in $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and Zuckerberg plans to attend next week’s ceremony alongside fellow tech leaders Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

But while all these moves suggest a political realignment of Meta to navigate the incoming administration’s restructuring of government policy, Tuesday’s announcement was more of a throwback to the cutthroat startup world from whence TheFacebook, as it was first known, came:

• With over 72,000 employees, the redundancies could impact over 3,600 positions. Zuckerberg said straight up that it’ll be a more ruthless round than usual: “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
• Meta shares slid 1.9% Tuesday, outstripping smaller declines in big tech stocks such as Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. That, however, may relate to advertising, which makes up the lion’s share of Meta’s $135 billion in revenue — some ad execs told the Financial Times on Sunday that the end of fact-checking could dent the company’s sales if their clients worry about running ads next to unmoderated content (though it may be fair to wonder where brands would flee to, especially with TikTok on the ropes).

Home Before Abroad: Two members of Meta’s oversight board wrote in Prospect magazine last week that the rollout of the company’s fact-checking changes will take up to a year, but that there are no indications they will be instituted abroad any time soon, if at all. The performance-based cuts, too, have a definite US timeline, with American workers to be notified they’re being let go by February 10, and workers elsewhere getting the grand ole TBD.

Who’d have thought a brain transplant would be so tricky?

According to a Financial Times report published Tuesday, Amazon’s attempt to bring Alexa into the zeitgeist by replacing the voice assistant’s “brain” with generative AI software has traveled an extremely bumpy road. Sources told the FT that weaving generative AI into Alexa’s operating system has been incredibly challenging, and the company’s struggle gives us a glimpse into how the wider world of voice assistants is trying to keep up with the technology du jour.

The Operation Behind the Brains 

According to the FT, Amazon has spent the last two years on the project, which aims to make Alexa a far more capable virtual assistant, able to understand and react to a wider range of queries or requests. It’s a logical step for voice assistants: Alexa and Siri have to move with the times just like the rest of us, and while companies like Amazon and Apple don’t exactly have first-mover advantage, they do have the advantage of having already placed the hardware these assistants run on in our homes and pockets.

Switching from Alexa’s old software to Large Language Models (LLMs) has been extremely complex, however, more so than Amazon was expecting, sources told the FT. Among the technical roadblocks encountered by the company — which is using more than one LLM, also integrating Anthropic’s Claude on top of Amazon’s in-house software — are:

• Latency: If you ask Alexa a question, you expect an answer pretty quickly, but doing that with at least two LLMs working behind the scenes is difficult — at least, it is if you’re Amazon and you don’t want to be losing money on all the compute required to make that answer come back fast. “When you’re trying to make reliable actions happen at speed […]  you have to be able to do it in a very cost-effective way,” Rohit Prasad, head of the artificial general intelligence (AGI) team at Amazon, told the FT.
• Cost-effectiveness: With regard to Alexa, that’s a sensitive topic for Amazon, as the division that makes the smart speakers which Alexa runs on has historically been a money-loser. At the moment, there’s a pretty fine tightrope between the money-making and money-bleeding powers of generative AI: Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company’s “Pro” subscription for ChatGPT, which costs $200 per month and gives users unlimited access to an upgraded version of ChatGPT, is losing money.

Alexa in the Sky With Diamonds: There’s also the risk that a generative AI-ified Alexa might “hallucinate,” as is the habit of generative AI so far. One source who was a former member of the Alexa team told the FT that fabricated answers were a big risk for Alexa’s brand. “At the scale that Amazon operates, that could happen large numbers of times per day,” this person said.

It’s basic Newtonian physics, as Boeing just learned: When the sky falls for a company, so, too, will the bottom line. 

On Monday, the extremely troubled aerospace giant announced its total delivery figures for 2024, which fell about 33% year-over-year, thanks to the company’s polycrisis of terrifying mid-air malfunctions and a protracted labor strike. Unsurprisingly, rival Airbus filled the void. And then some.

Entering a Freefall

Boeing’s terrible, horrible, very bad, no good year needs no recap (though here’s one anyway, just in case). But now the fallout is clear. Last year, Boeing delivered just 348 aircraft, its lowest figure since the pandemic and down from 528 in 2023. Way back in 2018, the manufacturer delivered a record 806 planes. Back in October, Boeing had reported losses of around $8 billion through the first nine months of 2024 — a number likely to balloon when Boeing reports fourth-quarter and full-year results in a couple weeks.

That’s all pretty bad. Worse? Airbus wasted no time swooping into the open market space:

• Last year, Boeing’s European competitor, which announced its 2024 figures last week, delivered 766 aircraft — the most since 2019. Airbus also said it logged 878 gross orders and 826 net orders last year, besting Boeing’s 569 gross and 377 net orders, respectively.
• Still, both firms face headwinds moving forward due to ongoing supply chain constraints, which factored heavily in Boeing’s bad year along with its near-disasters and labor stoppage.

On the Horizon: So will things ever get better for Boeing? At the Airline Economics conference in Dublin on Monday, Boeing’s vice president for commercial marketing Darren Hurst projected “about a five-year impact in terms of what we need to do” to return balance to supply and market demand. Translation: Boeing’s gonna be in it for the long, long haul.