Meta is cutting around 600 jobs at its artificial intelligence unit as the tech giant aims to move faster to compete with rivals.
The company declined to comment on the job cuts, but confirmed an earlier report from Axios, which cited a Wednesday memo sent by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, to employees.
“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will carry more weight and have more reach and impact,” the memo said.
The job cuts affected workers at Meta’s superintelligence lab, a division with several thousand employees. The company is working to bring “superintelligence” – AI that surpasses human intelligence – to everyone, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a July memo.
Employees learned Wednesday whether they risked losing their jobs. Those affected can apply for other positions. A.
The layoffs will not affect workers at Meta’s new TBD lab unit, where leading researchers and engineers work on the company’s next-generation foundation models.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has doubled down on its AI efforts, spending billions of dollars on initiatives to advance the technology.
The job cuts follow a recent hiring spree, which involved offering lucrative packages to recruit top talent.
This year, Meta hired Wang from Scale AI, a San Francisco startup that helps label and annotate the enormous amount of data used to train large language models.
Models enable the development of powerful AI applications that people increasingly use to write, code, and facilitate other tasks. Wang founded Scale AI and served as CEO of the startup before joining Meta. The company also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI.
Meta worked on AI research before the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT sparked a race to dominate artificial intelligence.
Competition has intensified, with tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and smaller startups rapidly launching new AI products and features.
Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, has also built new data centers and developed hardware such as smart glasses with AI capabilities. It also introduced an AI application.
The rise of artificial intelligence, capable of performing tedious tasks, has also increased anxiety among workers who fear their work will be automated.
Tech companies continued to lay off workers this year, even as executives pointed to several reasons for job cuts outside of AI.
Meta has laid off staff while hiring new ones. As of June 30, the company had 75,945 employees, up 7% year-on-year.
