Meta's Apparent Contradiction and the Impact of AI on the Job Market.

Speaker A: In 2017, something incredible and historic took place. And no, it wasn't Donald Trump's inauguration or Emmanuel Macron's election. It wasn't either the MeToo movement or the arrest of Harvey Weinstein. It was something that, if you like soccer, you definitely remember. It was a transfer of Neymar from Barcelona to Paris Saint Germain for 222 million euros. And yes, to that day, it remains the most expensive transfer in the history of the sport. The only one that came close was Kylian Mbappe's move also to PSG for around 180 million euros. And it's astonishing to even think about numbers like that. And for a long time, this kind of bidding war seemed exclusive to sports. Because think about it, how much would a transfer of a scientist be worth? Or a bidding war between the world's top universities for a single researcher? Probably not even closed. Even in the corporate world, as much as well paid CEOs, uh, are, their compensation is typically tied to performance results, bonuses. But recently something changed with the rise of AI. Major tech companies have started treating certain professionals. And yes, these professionals are AI scientists and engineers, almost like soccer players, people with extremely rare knowledge being fought over at any cost. Whoever pays more, wins. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. About this new logic where professionals become million dollar transfers. About the role of Meta in this movement and most importantly, how about what it reveals about the future of the job market. Here's your host, Andrea Llorio, speaker and author on AI leadership and innovation. I was, uh, director at Tinder for five years and Chief Digital Officer at l'. Oreal. I'm also an MBA professor at Funda Salon Cabral and columnist for MIT Technology Review and Wired Mexico. And my latest book is between youn and AI, published by Wiley. Learn everything about me@AndreAYorio.com and so to kick off this episode of between youn and AI, let's zoom in in a moment on Meta platforms, which you probably still know as Facebook, and its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who by the way is also into Jiu Jitsu and MMA as me. And so we've got something in common. But the company has been spending heavily on AI. Uh, that's a fact. It has made acquisitions like the Agentic AI startup Manus for around $2 billion, as well as the AI agent social platform mold book, which made the headlines over the world. But more than buying companies, Meta has started buying something even more valuable, people. A clear example of this was the $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought closer to Meta its founder, Alexander Wang, who eventually went on to lead Meta's new superintelligence lab. This lab has indeed an ambitious goal to pursue the so called Superintelligence, a hypothetical AI system that would surpass human intelligence. Now, interestingly, so far the results have been far from impressive. The lab has already gone through multiple reorganizations in just a few months, being split into different specialized team and some key talent left early on. On top of that, advances in models like Llama 4 have been heavily criticized when compared to competitors like Google's Gemini. Alexander Wang wasn't the only one, though. Since 2025, Meta Platforms has reportedly made very, very massive offers to talent from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, with compensation packages exceeding $100 million. One of the most striking examples is Matt Deitkin, born in 2001. So yes, he's just 25 years old. He reportedly joined Meta's Superintelligence lab in after accepting an offer of around $250 million. And here's something curious. If you do a quick conversion that's roughly the same as Neymar's transfer. So maybe this isn't just a coincidence, but it's a signal. It's a signal that AI engineers have literally become the new soccer players. And of course, other companies that are also entering this race, like X, uh, AI, which developed Grok and attracted names like Igor Babushkin. But right now, the clear protagonist in this movement is Meta. And now let's pause for a second. Isn't this the same Meta that according to Reuters, citing internal sources, is planning to lay off around 20% of its workforce? Yes, one in five employees globally. Let me get this straight. On the one side, hundreds of million dollars being paid to a handful of top talents. On the other hand, thousands of people are losing their jobs. That sounds like a massive contradiction, but hold on, because when you look closer, it might not actually be a contradiction at all. Look, let's dive deeper. Meta is reportedly planning its largest round of layoff since the 2022 restructuring. The company is considering cutting around 20% of its workforce, which is around 79,000 people, meaning firing for around 15,000 jobs. They've confirmed combined, this is almost as the layoffs in 2022 and 2023, which totaled around 21,000 people. Now, why? There's two main drivers. The first is cost. Meta plans to nearly double its capex this year, reaching something close to $135 billion. Most of that investment is going straight into AI infrastructure data centers Chips, models. And so money, uh, is needed for these capex investments. The second factor is productivity. The logic is simple and brutal. Um, if AI allows smaller teams to do more, then you need fewer people to deliver the same output. And this isn't just an isolated move, it's happening across the entire industry block. For example, by Jack Dorsey reduced its workforce, explicitly citing AI as one of the reasons by 40%. Atlassian cut around 10% of its employees to redirect investments towards AI and enterprise sales. Amazon, um, eliminated tens of thousands of roles to simplify its structure while accelerating its AI investment. And when you look at this pattern as a whole, feeling starts to emerge in the market. Feeling that we can call anxiety, maybe even the beginning of panic. Because the question is no longer if this will happen, but who's next? No, the fact that Meta and other big tech companies are paying soccer player level salaries. Again, although it seems like a contradiction, it's not, because at its core, it's the same logic operating at two extremes of the market. On the one side, companies lay off thousands of people. On the other side, they pay astronomical packages to a tiny group of AI researchers and leaders. And it's a clear reflection of a deep shift in what the market values. For a long time, value was tied to execution, writing code, producing analysis, running processes, managing workflows, documenting, reviewing, organizing, doing things. All of that still matters. But these are largely structured, repeatable and decomposable activities. And precisely because of these characteristics, they are the first to be substituted by AI. Uh, then something interesting happens. The middle of the market starts losing value faster. Because if a company used to need 10 people to produce a certain amount of code, reports of support, well, now it might need six or four. And as long as these people know how to work with AI, well, efficiency goes, um, up and the need for labor volume goes down. And that's exactly why top salaries are exploding. Because companies are no longer paying just for individual productivity. They're paying for something much, much more rare, which is cognitive leverage. An exceptional AI researcher or leader is invaluable because they just produce more or write code faster. They're valuable because they can change the entire trajectory of a company. Change the product, change a strategy, change the business model, change the future. And once you enter that logic, compensation stops being salary in the traditional sense. It starts to resemble much more, like a venture capital model or elite sports. If one person significantly increases your chances of leading the next major AI breakthrough while paying $100 million seems expensive, but losing that person to a competitor or Giving up on that person or not having it on your team could cost far more. In other words, AI is flattening the value of standardized cognition and dramatically inflating the value of rare cognition. It doesn't destroy value evenly. It redistributes value unevenly. It reduces the premium on predictable execution. It increases the premium on strategic thinking and multiplies the premium on rare genius. And the result is a much more polarized job market. Less space for purely operational middle roles, more pressure on execution generalists, and far greater rewards for those who combine technical depth with decision making, context and originality. Um, now the impacts of all this are already visible because, let's be honest, it's harder and harder to find a job nowadays. And this is happening for three main reasons. The first, we've already seen mass layoffs. The second is that fewer new roles are being created. Data from Randstad shows that entry level job creation has dropped by around 26% in, in the United States over the last six months. And this is no coincidence. Many of those initial tasks are now handled by AI. Uh, because that's the third reason. Today AI agents can do what used to require entire teams, which means companies simply need fewer people to produce the same output. And the market has become so challenging that a new concept has emerged. Reverse recruiting. Instead of headhunters working for companies, they now work for the candidates charging a percentage of the salary to help them land a job. Now, let's be honest, people like Alexander Wang or Matt Dadeke don't need reverse recruiters. But the question here is, what about you? And, uh, how much of your work is still stuck in predictable execution? And how much of your value lies in your rare genius? Because here's the paradox. The more unique you are in this market, the more the market will compete and fight for you. So with this reflection, I wanted to wrap up this episode of between youn and AI and I want you to thank for your attention up until now. Please reflect on all this, uh, almost as a homework, and let me know your thoughts, any questions, reflections, feedback, or even criticism. You can send it through my website, Andrei Audio, or on Instagram. Thank you so much for listening. And I'll see you next week with another episode of between youn and AI.