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Meta has laid off 600 employees from its flashy AI division, known as Superintelligence Labs, potentially marking the start of a major restructuring under new leadership.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent most of this year building up the team, making headlines for hefty pay packages—some reportedly worth up to $300 million—that lured AI leaders from competitors like OpenAI and Apple. That includes Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, who sold a 49% stake in his company to Meta in June for $14.3 billion before joining Meta as its chief AI officer.
Wang notified staff of the layoffs in a Wednesday memo, CNBC reports. The division has around 3,000 employees, so the cuts amount to 20%. It became overstaffed after a recent hiring spree, according to The New York Times.
"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, the Times reports. Meta insists that the layoffs are not a retreat from its AI efforts, but rather a way to accelerate them.
Multiple researchers confirmed on social media that they lost their jobs. "I was impacted by Meta layoffs today," writes Mimansa Jaiswal, a research scientist focused on LLM post-training. "I’ve focused on understanding why/where models fail & how to make them better. I’m looking for opportunities; please reach out!"
Meta reportedly plans to try to reassign affected employees to other positions.
In January, Meta cut 5% of its workforce, or an estimated 3,600 jobs. Zuckerberg said it was performance-based, and that he had "decided to raise the bar," and recruit top talent. However, multiple affected employees reported receiving top marks on their performance reviews.
Superintelligence Labs' mission is to create technology that is smarter than humans, but it has yet to release a game-changing product. In late September, the team debuted Vibes, an AI-generated video feed for social media. OpenAI released its own version the same week, and both faced backlash for having little utility.
Arguably, Meta's biggest AI success this year is its VR headset and accompanying neural band. They received rave reviews from PCMag's smart glasses expert, Will Greenwald.