Tensions were high inside Meta ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s first all-hands meeting of the year.
Employee-submitted questions for the CEO touched on a couple of big themes: concerns about his announcement that “low-performers” would be let go on February 10th, his MAGA-fueled changes to Meta’s content moderation policies and DEI programs, and his comment to Joe Rogan about wanting more “masculine energy” in the workplace. “Are the changes we’re seeing (in any way) influenced by the new U.S. president?” asked one employee ahead of the internal meeting. “If so, why are we making changes based on these factors?”
With a lot of the rank and file clearly on edge, Zuckerberg made sure there would be fewer opportunities for drama during today’s Q&A. Before it started, HR notified employees that “we will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak.” For the first time, the most upvoted employee questions were no longer ranked for everyone to see and comments were disabled during the livestream.
Before jumping into the Q&A, Zuckerberg addressed the changes head on: “We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks. It sucks.”
“We are going to try to address all the main themes and topics but, for where we are now, there are just a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about,” he continued. “So I’m just not going to talk about those.” (Meta declined to comment for this story.)
There were still some things Zuckerberg was comfortable addressing. Fears about a return-to-office policy change? “I just have not been focused on this at all. I think the status quo is fine. Carry on.” The rationale behind ending some employee perks, like free EV charging at the office, when Meta is printing money? “Part of the reason why we’re doing well financially is because we’re being disciplined on costs.”
What about the looming “low-performer” layoffs? “The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off,” he said. “I think, in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”
Clad in a gold chain and white long sleeve shirt, Zuckerberg explained his decision to end Meta’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs: “I think the direction of the policy and regulatory and legal direction on a lot of this stuff is that you can’t do things that advantage specific groups, even if you’re trying to make up for other things.”
He noted that “we’re probably going to bring back” unconscious bias training for employees but that it wouldn’t “just focus” on a “few groups of underrepresented types of people.” Janelle Gale, Meta’s head of HR, then jumped in to say “we have zero tolerance for harassment or discrimination of any kind,” that the company will “continue to recruit from a broad talent pool” and “celebrate” Black History Month.
As to why he overhauled Meta’s content rules to allow for things like calling trans people “mentally ill,” Zuckerberg framed the decision this way: “There were a bunch of policies that we implemented over time that sort of narrowed what people could say on our services. Frankly, we were just way out of the mainstream. When we say that someone can say something on our services, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with that thing. It just means that we want to be a platform where people can discuss things.”
Zuckerberg kicked off the meeting mostly reiterating his predictions on AI and smart glasses from Meta’s earnings call the day before. He went into more detail on the company’s smart glasses with Ray-Ban, which he said sold over 1 million units last year. (This is the first time Meta has shared an official sales stat on the glasses widely.)
“A lot of the big hit products in their third generation reached 5 to 10 million units,” Zuckerberg said. “So I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? Are we going to go from 1 million to 5 million?”
While he didn’t mention it during the meeting, Meta is planning to introduce a pricey pair of smart glasses with a heads-up display, codenamed Hypernova, later this year. They aren’t designed by Ray-Ban or its parent company EssilorLuxottica, but I expect the eyewear giant to play a role in their commercial rollout. Meta is also working with EssilorLuxottica on Oakley smart glasses for athletes.
“We basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet and they will,” Zuckerberg said in today’s meeting. “I think we’ll probably start seeing some of that maybe a little later this year, maybe next year. But we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity.”
Some other highlights from Zuckerberg’s Q&A:
Working with the Trump administration: “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government and we’re going to take that. I think it’s the right thing to do because there are several areas, even if we don’t agree on everything, where we have common cause for things that are going to make it so that we can serve our community better and we can advance the interests of our country together… We’re going to do those in a way that we’re not going to compromise any of our principles or values.”
The plan for Meta AI: The ChatGPT rival has “around 700 million” monthly users and Zuckerberg believes it will get to 1 billion users this year. “We know from building a lot of stuff over the last 20 years that services can kind of come and go, but once something reaches that scale and has a data flywheel, it generally can develop a pretty durable advantage … We have a bunch of work to make it more engaging this year. We’re going to focus a lot on personalization as one of the key themes around this.”
Competing with paid AI products like ChatGPT: “I’m always looking for ways that we can convert the strength of our business model into delivering a higher quality product to people… We have a model that’s competitive with the best models out there and we offer it for free. We’re not charging $20 or $200 a month or whatever. Now, I think that there might be an opportunity to do even more… We can deliver even higher quality answers than other people in the industry could deliver and also make that free.”
AI in social media: “I think in the next few years we’re going to have all kinds of feed units that are way more interactive… I think this year we’re going to have stuff where you have an AI agent in a video in your feed but then you can just start talking back to it and steer it and ask it all these interesting questions.”
Meta’s efforts to build an AI engineer: “Does that mean that we’re not going to need engineers? Actually, the opposite. If an engineer can now do a hundred times more work I want a lot more engineers, right? I would guess that we’re going to be able to train AIs to do a better job than a lot of the human reviewers… It’s probably not the case that kind of flip will happen until next year.”
DeepSeek: “Whenever I see someone else do something, I’m like, ‘Ah come on! We should have been there, right? We [have] got to make sure we’re on it.”
The TikTok ban: “I’m pretty sure whatever happens, I’m very confident that Facebook and Instagram Reels are going to continue growing… Who’s going to own TikTok at the end of the year? What’s going to happen? That’s a big deal.”
His parting message to employees: “It’s going to be an intense year, so buckle up. We’ve got a lot to do. I’m excited about it.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
