Summary
- Meta laid off 600 employees from the artificial intelligence division undergoing restructuring to reduce bureaucracy and increase efficiency.
- The change was motivated by Mark Zuckerberg’s concerns about the pace of advances in AI.
- Despite the layoffs, Meta continues to hire for TBD Lab, a new division of the laboratory, and tries to attract more talent from OpenAI and Google.
Meta laid off at least 600 employees from its newly formed “artificial superintelligence” laboratory. The measure is part of an internal restructuring that, according to a memo from the company’s AI director, Alexandr Wang, aims to reduce bureaucracy and increase the division’s efficiency.
The announcement was made internally by Wang in a statement to employees. The information is from the portal Axiosbut were confirmed by Meta when TechCrunch. The reorganization seeks to create a “more agile” operation in the sector.
The laboratory was created in June this year to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and advance the fight for the AI market, currently dominated by other companies. Since then, Meta has spent billions of dollars on hiring and investments.
In the internal memo, Wang justified the restructuring as a move to optimize processes and speed up decision-making. “By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be needed to make a decision, and each person will have more responsibility and more scope and impact,” the executive wrote.
The cuts, which affect a fraction of the thousands of roles within the superintelligence division, specifically target FAIR AI research units, product-related AI teams, and the AI infrastructure area.
Meta further stated that it actively encourages impacted employees to apply for other available positions internally. “This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other areas of the company,” Wang said in the release.
The decision is in line with Meta’s recent philosophy, defined by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “year of efficiency”. This guideline, implemented last year, has resulted in previous rounds of mass layoffs and a general reassessment of the company’s projects and cost structure. At the time, Zuckerberg declared his preference for a “leaner” organization.
The current restructuring, however, is presented more as a strategic realignment. Internal sources, as reported by Axiosindicate that Zuckerberg expressed concerns a few months ago about the pace of advances in the AI division. The assessment was that existing efforts were not generating the “performance improvements” or “necessary advances” at the desired speed.
This perception would have been the reason for the reorganization, which included not only the announced cuts, but also the previous investment of US$15 billion (around R$81 billion) in Scale AI and the hiring of Alexandr Wang to lead the division. The main objective would, therefore, be to focus resources on areas considered to have the greatest potential and remove operational bottlenecks.
Despite the cuts, Wang expressed confidence in the division’s future in his statement. “I’m really excited about the models we’re training, our computing plans, and the products we’re building, and I’m confident in our path to building superintelligence,” he concluded.
Cuts occur after millionaire hires
Although it is laying off hundreds of AI professionals, Meta has invested aggressively in hiring talent. The newly formed division, known internally as TBD Lab, was not affected by the cuts and, according to sources, continues to actively recruit in the market.
This new laboratory has attracted professionals from direct competitors. Recently, Meta hired Ananya Kumar, a research scientist from OpenAI. Prior to this, Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Thinking Machines, also joined the company to join the TBD Lab.
These hires add to a broader effort by Meta over the past year to attract AI experts. The company managed to recruit more than 50 researchers from competitors such as Google and OpenAI, offering salary packages that, in some cases, reached multimillion-dollar values. Some, however, abandoned the Meta.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/meta-demite-600-funcionarios-de-divisao-de-inteligencia-artificial/
