Meta plans to cut 600 jobs at AI superintelligence labs

San Francisco: Meta on Wednesday said that it plans to 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 will be in Meta's so-called Superintelligence Labs, which is the umbrella name for the company's AI efforts. The division has a few thousand 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 do not affect these newest hires, who have been empowered to develop "superintelligence," or artificial intelligence that exceeds the human brain.

Instead, the job cuts are aimed at cleaning up the organizational 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 aim to help Meta develop AI products more quickly, 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, which were earlier reported by Axios, come 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 began hiring 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.

After a rocky first half of this year, Zuckerberg moved to restart the AI efforts. In June, he 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 also 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.

In August, Zuckerberg split Meta Superintelligence into four groups. One is called FAIR, which is focused on AI research; a second is working on superintelligence; another on products; and a fourth on infrastructure, such as data centers and other AI hardware.

The planned cuts will affect employees at FAIR and in the product division, according to Wang's memo. Employees who are laid off were set to receive emails by 10 a.m. ET, and the company plans to try to find other positions internally for those affected.

No cuts will be made to TBD, the team building superintelligence and managing Meta's large language models, which drive chatbots and other AI products, the people with knowledge of the situation said. The company is still hiring AI researchers in the TBD unit, which is managed by Wang, the people said.

Meta executives have emphasized that the cuts do not mean they are retrenching on AI efforts, and that superintelligence remains among Zuckerberg's top priorities for the company.