Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, wrote in a memo to staff on Wednesday that the company will cut about 600 jobs from its superintelligence lab, according to a report from Axios.
Meta declined to comment, but told TechCrunch that Axios’ reporting is accurate.
As Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other companies race to build the most powerful AI systems, Meta had a busy summer on the hiring front. The company poached more than 50 researchers from its competitors by offering multi-million dollar pay packages, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that “none of [OpenAI’s] best people” took the offers.
“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 to staff.
This line of thinking tracks with Meta’s recent “year of efficiency” — a more sanitized way to describe the company’s mass layoffs. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that “leaner is better.”
Now, it seems that Meta isn’t lowering its overall headcount by much, but rather, reorganizing its efforts. The company claims that most of these people impacted today should be able to find another job within Meta.