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Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is set to cut around 600 roles in its artificial intelligence division, Superintelligence Labs. The job cuts were first reported by Axios, with an internal memo reportedly sent to staff by Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang stating: “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.” The lay offs will affect Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit and teams focused on product-related AI and AI infrastructure. The newer TBD lab won’t be impacted. The company is reportedly encouraging impacted employees to apply for other jobs within Meta. The cuts come after Zuckerberg went on a mass hiring spree earlier this year as part of a bid to revitalise Meta’s AI efforts following Superintelligence Labs senior staff departures and a poor reception for its open-source Llama 4 model. The company hired dozens of talented AI researchers from rivals with promises of share deals and huge signing bonuses, some worth more than $154 billion ($US100b). At the time, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, claimed Meta had been making “giant offers” in a bid to poach is staff. They started making these giant offers to a lot of people in our team. $100m signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. It is crazy,” he said. “I am really happy that so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” Earlier this month it was announced that Zuckerberg had poached Australian AI “genius” Andrew Tulloch, who co-founded start-up Thinking Machines Lab, alongside former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati. This follows earlier reports from The Wall Street Journal that the Perth-raised Mr Tulloch had knocked back a $1.55 billion ($US1b) package to join Meta. Mr Tulloch refused the offer, according to the report, although Meta told the newspaper the figures it cited were “inaccurate and ridiculous”. The publication reported that the offer was made to Mr Tulloch after Ms Murati knocked back Zuckerberg‘s offer to buy Thinking Machines Lab. The Meta founder hasn’t been shy about his bold AI plans, promising to spend billions of dollars this year alone in order catch up with rivals such as OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
