Meta is correcting its hiring spree by laying off approximately 600 employees from its SuperAI Labs. This layoff did not affect Meta's latest job openings in artificial intelligence . Talented individuals.
According to a report relayed to The New York Times According to a Meta employee memo, Meta announced on Wednesday that it will lay off approximately 600 people at its Super Intelligence Lab. The lab, established in July to accelerate research in artificial general intelligence (AGI) and led by Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old former CEO of data labeling startup Scale AI, has about 3,000 employees.
According to CNBC, the layoffs are part of Meta's efforts to further streamline departments and solidify Alexandr Wang's leadership in the company's artificial intelligence strategy by reducing layers and improving operational efficiency.
In a memo to employees, Alexandr Wang wrote, “By reducing team size, the number of communication steps required for decision-making will be reduced, and each person will have greater responsibility, scope of responsibility, and influence.”
It is understood that the TBD (Total Depth Design) department, led by Alexandr Wang and responsible for developing superintelligence and managing Meta's large language model, was unaffected by the layoffs. Sources familiar with the matter indicated that the TBD department includes several top AI talents recruited by Meta this summer. The fact that these employees, managed by Alexandr Wang, were not laid off highlights that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg values these highly paid hires more than existing employees.
Meta executives emphasized that the layoffs do not mean the company will reduce its investment in AI; super intelligence remains one of its core priorities. Two sources familiar with the matter revealed that the layoffs are aimed at addressing organizational bloat. Meta's AI business expanded too rapidly over the past three years, ultimately leading to this situation. The layoffs are intended to help Meta develop AI products more quickly.
For the past three years, Meta has been grappling with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology. Following the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft... They are all hiring aggressively to develop the next generation of AI chatbots. And other products. Meta initially developed the Llama open-source AI model, but subsequent progress stalled. Over the past 18 months, Meta has restarted a hiring spree, but strategic missteps have ultimately led to frequent product development problems.
After experiencing turmoil in the first half of this year, Zuckerberg relaunched the artificial intelligence business, hiring aggressively and offering high salaries to attract top AI talent. In June, he invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, and subsequently, Zuckerberg brought top Scale AI talent, including Alexandr Wang, into the Meta superintelligence lab.
Zuckerberg has also spent billions of dollars on projects from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft , and Apple. Other AI labs and companies are poaching top researchers, some even offering hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to certain talents.
In August of this year, Zuckerberg split Meta's Superintelligence Lab into four departments. The First Artificial Intelligence (FAIR) department is responsible for AI research, while the other three departments are responsible for superintelligence R&D, product development, and infrastructure construction, respectively. Within Meta, research teams like FAIR often compete for computing resources with teams that are more product-focused.
Two sources familiar with the matter said that following the restructuring, employees in the FAIR division were vying to join Alexandr Wang's team. While Wang's core team members were recruited externally from companies like OpenAI and Google, he has recently also brought in dozens of AI researchers with specific expertise from other departments within Meta.
It is understood that the layoffs will affect employees in the FAIR, product, and infrastructure departments of the Super Intelligence Lab. The TBD department, responsible for developing super intelligence, is unaffected. Laid-off employees have received email notifications, and Meta plans to find alternative positions within the company for affected staff. On October 23, Tian Yuandong, a Chinese AI scientist at Meta, a FAIR researcher, and senior manager, posted that he and several members of his team were affected by the layoffs. Tian Yuandong's research focuses on efficient training and inference of large models, representation learning, intelligent decision-making, and optimization.
(Source: The Paper)
