Meta has laid off about 600 workers from its artificial intelligence division, according to a company memo seen by The New York Times. The move comes as the tech giant tries to speed up its A.I. progress and compete with major rivals like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
The layoffs took place in Meta’s Superintelligence Labs; the main hub for its A.I. work which has around 3,000 employees. Sources said the goal was not to shrink the A.I. division permanently, but to cut down on excess layers of management that slowed decision-making.
Alexandr Wang, Meta’s new chief A.I. officer, told employees that having fewer people would help the team work faster and make decisions more efficiently. “Each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang said in the memo.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has spent the past three years trying to catch up in the fast-moving A.I. race. After OpenAI’s ChatGPT became a global hit in 2022, companies worldwide rushed to build powerful chatbots and digital tools.
Meta’s own A.I. model, called Llama, showed early promise, but its progress slowed last year. The company responded by hiring more researchers and pouring billions into new projects but that rapid growth led to confusion and delays.
Zuckerberg doubles down on A.I.
Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg restarted Meta’s A.I. mission with a new strategy. In June, he invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI, a startup co-founded by Wang, and later brought Wang and his top engineers into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.
Since then, Zuckerberg has been aggressively hiring top talent from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, offering massive pay packages to lure them in. In August, he reorganized Meta’s A.I. unit into four parts: research (FAIR), superintelligence, products, and infrastructure.
Who was affected?
The job cuts affected workers across FAIR, the product division, and the infrastructure group. Staff were notified by email on Wednesday morning, and Meta said it would try to place some of them in other roles within the company.
However, no layoffs hit the TBD team; the group leading the development of Meta’s superintelligence systems and large language models, which power chatbots and other A.I. products. In fact, that team is still hiring.
Despite the cuts, Meta insists that A.I. remains one of Zuckerberg’s top priorities. The company is still investing heavily in advanced A.I. projects and wants to build technology that surpasses human intelligence.
In another bold move, Meta announced that it will block access to non-Meta chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT on WhatsApp starting next year. The company said external A.I. tools were using WhatsApp’s business messaging system for purposes beyond customer service. OpenAI disagreed with that claim.
Reacting to the news, OpenAI’s vice president of science, Kevin Weil, posted online: “Hard to believe Meta is shutting off 1-800-CHATGPT, which has many millions of happy users. If you’re one of them, you can move to our app, website, or browser to keep your conversations.”
Meta’s recent shakeup shows how fierce the competition has become in the world of artificial intelligence and how far big tech firms are willing to go to stay ahead.
