Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates

This week on Uncanny Valley, the team discusses Meta’s recent layoffs and what they’ve been hearing from employees about the increasingly grim vibes at the company. They also talk about Elon Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI and share highlights from Google’s annual conference—including an ambitious AI vision to change how people search the web. Finally, what do recent college graduates and women whose spouses work in AI have in common? They’re all sick of hearing about it. Articles mentioned in this episode: - Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale - Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026: Gemini, Search, Smart Glasses - Google Search Goes Agentic—and Doesn’t Need You Anymore - Meet the Sad Wives of AI You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at [email protected]. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry. Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. Brian Barrett: And we're all in the same room— Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my God. Brian Barrett: —for the first time from the podcast. Zoë Schiffer: Same room. Leah Feiger: I got invited to the group chat. Zoë Schiffer: You did. Brian Barrett: Look at that. Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're discussing the complete meltdown over mass layoffs at Meta. We spoke to more than a dozen employees and it turns out the job cuts are far from the only reason why Meta employees are really going through it. Brian Barrett: And of course, we wouldn't skip the Elon Musk verdict. He lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI in really as full a way as you can, as dramatically as possible. I know, Zoë, you're looking forward to talking about that. Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Brian Barrett: And I'm looking forward to talking about Google's annual developer conference, I/O, where it debuted some dramatic changes to search. Leah Feiger: And you might've seen that Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt, recently got booed by graduating students after he praised AI in a commencement speech. We're going to get into why young adults might be using AI, but they have very complicated feelings about it. And later in the show, we're going to hear about why women married to AI bros have had enough. Zoë Schiffer: First up, let's dive into what is happening at Meta. This week, the company is letting go of roughly 10 percent of its workforce, which is about 8,000 employees total. It's the latest round of job cuts, adding to the roughly 25,000 jobs that have been cut in the past few years as part of Mark Zuckerberg's Year of Efficiency that started in 2023 and now the latest AI-forward workplace, which he is trying to develop and impose. And while these latest cuts are not as big as some of the rounds of layoffs that have already happened, they're getting a ton of attention because Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, has said that the reason they're happening, in part at least, in large part, is because the company is spending so much money on AI and data centers. Brian Barrett: We record this on a Tuesday, but the reason we're able to talk so fully and confidently about this is because Meta announced this a while ago. Leah Feiger: Oh, yeah. Zoë Schiffer: They didn't announce it. The news leaked. Brian Barrett: The news leaked. But then they acknowledged it. Zoë Schiffer: Weeks and weeks later. Brian Barrett: Yes. But still, it's been a long time— Zoë Schiffer: It's a long time. Brian Barrett: —that this has been out in the open, which has resulted in, I think, a little bit of chaos time inside of Meta because you've got, a what, a one in 10 chance of not having your job anymore? Zoë Schiffer: Yeah it’s, I mean, suffice to say, impacting morale in really horrific ways, but it's not the only thing, like we said. Mark Zuckerberg is also really encouraging employees to use AI. There've been all of these changes internally to that end. Some people really like it and are adopting it. Some people are really pushing back on it. But I think for a lot of employees who joined Meta during this era of endless perks, lots of job security, kind of like a chiller atmosphere compared to some of the other startups in the Valley. Leah Feiger: Let's invest. Zoë Schiffer: They have that going for a while. Leah Feiger: It wasn't full Google, but it— Zoë Schiffer: Somewhat there. Leah Feiger: —had that vibe. To me, someone so on the outside of this in every single way, I know about these layoffs because they've been, A) so chaotic, but B) in some ways, needlessly so. Not to say that other tech companies aren't firing scores of workers all the time. That feels like something we discuss on this podcast frequently, but this is happening with such a large runway and in a way that's making employees feel so terrible about themselves. Brian Barrett: Well, because it's not just the layoffs, right? It's also, even if you stay there, if you're not culled from the herd, you are going to have to deal with this world in which you've got spyware on your laptops training AI to probably take your job at some point, right? Zoë Schiffer: Explain that a little bit. Brian Barrett: Meta announced, and this was more public, that they were going to put software on employee laptops that would monitor their keystrokes and how they move their cursors and basically how they do their job as Meta engineers and use that as training data for their own internal models to try to make their AI models better because they're running out of other sources. Zoë Schiffer: And could you opt out of that, Brian? Brian Barrett: That's a great question. I'm so glad you asked. You could not opt out. Zoë Schiffer: I felt you didn't know the answer to that one. Brian Barrett: In fact, when an employee asked in a very public forum within Meta, "Hey, could we not do this?" Zoë, the response was? Zoë Schiffer: Oh, absolutely you're going to do this and shame on you for asking. And some of the employees who are staying, actually thousands of the employees who are staying, are getting drafted into the AI ranks. We published a piece today that was kind of about the morale inside the company, but also how there's been this mad dash to use up perks and stipends that employees have. But one of the things that's said at the end was that remaining employees are being asked to join AI teams. So whatever your job was previously, they're internally getting drafted. You're getting drafted into the AI ranks, now your job is going to look quite different. Brian Barrett: That's like 7,000 people. Zoë Schiffer: Yes. Leah Feiger: I've actually heard people use the word raptured. Zoë Schiffer: Oh, my gosh. Leah Feiger: Isn't that— Zoë Schiffer: And I wish we had that in the story. Leah Feiger: I'm so sorry, but raptured into other teams. All of a sudden one day they've just disappeared. After this layoff, has Zuckerberg and co proposed a sort of coherent leadership plan or proposal? What happens after this? Zoë Schiffer: This is the confusing thing according to employees I have talked to because the tough thing about what's happening right now is that Meta is actually experiencing record or near-record profits and revenue growth. The company is doing exceptionally well, but the company is not doing exceptionally well because of artificial intelligence. I talked to employees who are on Instagram and they say, "Look, our main competitor is TikTok. TikTok's not an AI company." In fact, you're trying to index on this thing that's really not at all why we're printing money and now you're laying a bunch of us off because of that thing when actually we're doing our jobs quite well because again, the company's printing money. Brian Barrett: Yeah. And there seems to be, and I think our reporting has shown, a little bit of mission drift within the company. And you've seen that not just with AI. You've seen that, I think, for a long time when you see this $80 billion bet or whatever it was on the metaverse and then saying, "Oh, nevermind, here's this new shiny thing." AI is not another metaverse. AI, I think, has a better business case behind it. But at the same time, to your point, right now it's not making money. Zoë Schiffer: No. And I talked to two people who were personally recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to join the very fancy AI effort and both of them said, "Look, the vision was AI-generated slop for Instagram and the other Meta properties." It just wasn't uninspired. And meanwhile, you have OpenAI and Anthropic, not to say they've done it, but their mission is, "We're going to completely change the economy and cure cancer." Leah Feiger: As opposed to make your grandmother's feed the most destructive sign you can ever see. Yeah. Zoë Schiffer: So people were just not inspired. Brian Barrett: And then even Meta has acknowledged that 10 percent-ish of its ad revenue comes from scams. They're like, "Yes, we know there are scams. We know we make a lot of money off them." And there's a presumed like, "We're on it," but not enough probably. Leah Feiger: We're seeing layoffs or announcements of layoffs in a lot of places like Microsoft, Coinbase, Cisco announced it was laying off 4,000 employees. Is this the spring of layoffs? What are we looking at here? Brian Barrett: Yeah, I think it's the same conversation I think that is evolving a little bit where a lot of times it's cover for having overhired. But increasingly, I think, Zoë, you've made this point, it actually is getting to be the point where AI can replace some engineers, or not entirely, but at least you can have a couple of engineers overseeing some agentic AI are more effective than 50 engineers. Zoë Schiffer: I've talked to a ton of people about this and my opinion, which I'm open to evolving over time, is that if you have really talented high-level engineers, they can manage agents that will do the work of lower-level engineers. So what you're losing now on is the entry-level jobs. And we're seeing that in studies. So when we look at job loss and AI job replacement, what's happening is that entry-level jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence. Leah Feiger: I feel like you have evolved on this in some ways. Over the time that we've been talking about this, you really went from like, "No, people aren't losing their jobs yet." We're now in, this is starting to happen, as Brian said. What's the next stage of this? Just tons more layoffs? Is this going to happen in a bigger, faster way or are we just going to see hiring just stagnant across the board? Zoë Schiffer: It's interesting. Brian brought up Google I/O, which I'm reluctant to talk about. Brian Barrett: This is crazy to me. Go ahead. We'll get there. Leah Feiger: This is amazing. Zoë Schiffer: Demis Hassabis talked to Will Knight, one of our reporters, today and he said, "I don't think that we should be having layoffs. I think that AI should create more productivity and we should be doing more." So I think you're going to see companies that are like, "Yeah, we can do even more than we could previously. We're just going to do more things, build more things, ship more product." But then I think you are going to see a lot of companies that say, "We can build and run Shopify with a handful of engineers, not the team of hundreds that we had previously." That's just an example. Brian Barrett: Speaking of ways in which AI companies grow and change, Elon Musk officially lost his lawsuit to Sam Altman and OpenAI this week. Zoë Schiffer: Such a special moment. Brian Barrett: It was. It was a special moment. To get people caught up a little bit who have not been tracking this as obsessively as I know Zoë has, and as Leah has too, Elon Musk had sued over claims that OpenAI illegally abandoned its nonprofit mission and turned into this for-profit giant. It took a jury slightly less than two hours to say, "No, go away." Zoë Schiffer: Incredible. Brian Barrett: But it was interesting too, the reason that they said that, they didn't even bother dealing with the merits. The statute of limitations had expired on this basically. And they said, "It's too late to bring this. If you had wanted to do this, you should have done this a while ago. And even beyond the statute of limitations, maybe you have more credibility if you're doing this before you are building your own giant competitor to OpenAI and have such a clear monetary interest beyond whatever compensation you get from the trial." When the decision was released on Monday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said that in her eyes, the trial had been worthwhile to bring clarity to the dispute and that there was, quote, "a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's findings, which is why I was prepared to accept the jury's findings and dismiss on the spot," which just to clarify, the jury decision was only one step. We needed the judge to also make their own determination, which happened almost immediately. Zoë Schiffer: I was talking to someone about this yesterday and I think that Elon Musk was trying to make the case that the clock should only have started when he realized there was a breach of the trust, basically when he realized that OpenAI was no longer a nonprofit and he was allowed to make that case in court. I do think a lot of people were confused on this point because they were like, "A statute of limitations thing seems like something he could have been told before." But I think you are allowed to argue the point. But this is why the entire trial we were like, "He has to make a very compelling argument that he didn't find out that OpenAI was starting this for-profit until 2023." And the evidence did not back it up. Brian Barrett: No. Also, I should say, to no one's surprise, Elon Musk is going to appeal or says he's going to appeal. He does have infinite money to do it. Zoë Schiffer: Marc Toberoff had one word leaving that courtroom, Elon Musk's lawyer, and he just said, "Appeal." Brian Barrett: Yeah. He also unsurprisingly posted about it on X saying of the judge, "She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years." Leah Feiger: I like that he called her an activist judge. I think that that has taken on a new realm of popularity in the Trump era of determining that these judges in this very specific branch of the government is in fact acting against one's best interest. Zoë Schiffer: And again,