Meta to slash 600 roles in Superintelligence Labs

Leaner teams will boost agility, the company says

Meta Platforms is cutting roughly 600 AI jobs even as it continues to hire more workers for its newly launched TBD Lab.

The cuts represent a small fraction of the several thousand employees working within the Superintelligence Labs unit but signal a shift toward a leaner, more streamlined operation.

The layoffs will affect staff across Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), as well as teams responsible for product-focused AI and AI infrastructure. Meta said the restructuring aims to make its AI division more flexible and responsive as it navigates fierce industry competition and an accelerating race to develop advanced AI models.

The company's newly created TBD Lab, a smaller group of "a few dozen" researchers and engineers charged with building Meta's next-generation foundation models, will not be affected by the job cuts.

In fact, Meta is still actively hiring for roles in TBD Lab, which it describes as central to its long-term AI ambitions.

Axios first reported the job cuts, citing a company memo.

"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," wrote Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang in the memo.

Wang, who joined Meta earlier this year following the company's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI has been tasked with consolidating Meta's sprawling AI operations.

Affected employees will be encouraged to apply for other roles within Meta.

"This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company," Wang said.

Fierce competition

The layoffs come at a critical juncture for Meta, which has struggled to keep pace with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft in the race to build cutting-edge AI systems since ChatGPT's debut in 2022 reshaped the industry.

Meta has reportedly offered compensation packages "into the hundreds of millions" to lure experts from rival firms, and whilst Meta initially gained traction with its open-source Llama language model, progress has slowed in recent months amid internal restructuring and leadership changes.

In response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has doubled down on AI, investing billions to recruit top researchers and developers and on Saturday, Meta announced that it will block access to non-Meta chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, on WhatsApp from next year.

The decision will prevent WhatsApp's three billion users from interacting with ChatGPT directly within the messaging platform.

A Meta spokeswoman said the company made the change because OpenAI and other firms had been using WhatsApp's business messaging tools beyond their intended purpose of facilitating customer service interactions.

Responding to the announcement, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's vice president of science, wrote on social media that it was "hard to believe Meta is shutting off 1-800-CHATGPT, which has many millions of happy users."

He encouraged affected users to switch to OpenAI's app, website, or browser to continue their conversations and preserve their chat history.