Today's Edition
SAN FRANCISCO (The New York Times)
Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence division, according to a memo sent to employees that was relayed to The New York Times, as the company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology.
The layoffs were in Meta’s so-called Superintelligence Labs, which is the umbrella name for the company’s AI efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees, though the exact number of workers was unclear.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has been on a hiring spree to stack his company with top AI researchers, including a new chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, earlier this year. The cuts on Wednesday did not affect these newest hires, who have been empowered to develop "superintelligence,” or artificial intelligence that exceeds the human brain.
Instead, the job cuts were aimed at cleaning up the organisational bloat that resulted from three years of building up Meta’s AI efforts too quickly, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The layoffs aimed to help Meta develop AI products more rapidly, they said.
"By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang wrote in the memo circulated to employees.
The cuts came at an intensely competitive time for Meta, which has spent the past three years dealing with the rapid onset of AI. After ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft hired furiously to build the next generation of AI chatbots and other products.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, struggled to keep up with the pack. After early success developing its open-source AI model, called Llama, its progress stagnated. The company went on a fresh hiring spree and made strategic errors, leading to product development issues over the past 18 months.
In June, Zuckerberg invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI, an artificial intelligence startup that was cofounded by Wang. Zuckerberg then brought ScaleAI’s top talent to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, including Wang.
Zuckerberg has since spent billions recruiting top researchers from other AI labs and companies, including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. Meta has dangled pay packages to some that number well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
