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].

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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 1 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 o