Meta has reportedly laid off several hundred employees from its AI in a sweeping internal shake-up aimed at streamlining operations. According to a report by Axios, around 600 positions have been cut across Meta’s FAIR AI research, product AI, and AI infrastructure teams, even as the company doubles down on its newly formed TBD Lab.
In an internal memo seen by Axios, Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang said the company’s long-standing AI efforts had grown “overly bureaucratic,” and that the restructuring was designed to make teams more agile. “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.
While US employees were notified of the job cuts early Wednesday, the company is reportedly encouraging affected staff to apply for other positions within Meta, with expectations that many will be rehired into different roles.
Despite the layoffs, Meta continues an aggressive hiring spree for its TBD Lab, which focuses on superintelligence research. Axios reported that Meta has recently recruited OpenAI research scientist Ananya Kumar and Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines.
The reorganisation follows CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s concern that Meta’s earlier AI initiatives were not delivering the breakthroughs or performance improvements the company sought. The leadership overhaul, coupled with Meta’s $15 billion investment in Scale AI, signals a renewed push toward building more advanced foundation models.
“I’m really excited about the models we’re training, our compute plans, and the products we’re building, and I’m confident in our path to build towards superintelligence,” Wang said in his memo, per Axios.utiny of AI companies over web scraping practices and unauthorised use of digital content. Several media outlets and creators have raised concerns about AI models being trained on copyrighted material without consent, prompting calls for clearer regulations and industry standards.
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