Copyright Anchorage Daily News
Meta is cutting roughly 600 positions in its artificial intelligence unit, in a reorganization of its workforce to better compete in the global AI race. Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, who was poached earlier this year from the start-up Scale AI, informed employees in a memo on Wednesday that the cuts were designed to reduce the size of the team and quicken decision-making so that the AI team can have more impact. The move was first reported by Axios and later confirmed by Meta spokesman Dave Arnold. The cuts will affect the company’s product AI teams, AI infrastructure teams and the FAIR AI research department, which are part of an overarching “superintelligence” lab that has several thousand employees. The cuts will not affect Meta’s newly created TBD lab, Meta confirmed. Meta is still expected to continue hiring for the lab. The reorganization is the latest in a string of changes that started this year when Meta created a new team dedicated to creating superintelligence, a term for machines hoped to one day outperform humans. Meta announced it was making a $14.3 billion investment in AI start-up Scale AI and then brought in Wang, who founded the start-up, to lead the company’s AI division. Since then, Meta has poached top talent artificial-intelligence researchers and engineers away from OpenAI, Apple and Google with eye-popping salaries. Zuckerberg has said that he wants to build “the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry.” And he has said in a podcast interview that there is “an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.” But as the tech company has built up and recruited new talent for its AI lab, others have left the company. In April, Joelle Pineau, who worked at Meta for about eight years, announced that she was leaving her post leading the Meta AI research lab FAIR. During her tenure, Meta sought to reshape the once-independent artificial intelligence research lab to be more aligned with the company’s business and product priorities.
