Meta is slashing roughly 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence unit as the tech giant aims to move faster to compete with its rivals.
The company declined to comment on the job cuts, but confirmed an earlier report by Axios, which cited a Wednesday memo that Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang sent to employees.
“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 memo said.
The job cuts hit workers in Meta’s superintelligence lab, a division that has 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 could lose their jobs. Those impacted can apply to other roles .
The layoffs won’t affect workers within Meta’s newly formed TBD Lab Unit where prominent researchers and engineers are working on the company’s next-generation foundation models.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been doubling down on its AI efforts, spending billions of dollars on initiatives to advance technology.
The job follow a recent hiring spree, which involved offering lucrative compensation packages to recruit top talent.
Earlier this year, Meta hired Wang from ScaleAI, a San Francisco startup that helps label and annotate the massive trove of data used to train large language models.
The models enable the development of powerful AI applications that people are increasingly using to write, code and help with other tasks. Wang founded ScaleAI and was the startup’s chief executive before joining Meta. The company also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI.
Meta has been working on AI research before the 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT set off a race to dominate artificial intelligence.
The competition has been heating up with tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and smaller startups that are rapidly releasing new AI products and feature.
Meta, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has also been building out new data centers, developing hardware such as smartglasses with AI features and introduced an AI app.
The rise of artificial intelligence that can complete tedious tasks has also increased anxiety among workers who fear their jobs could get automated.
Tech companies have continued to lay off workers this year although executives have pointed to several reasons for job cuts outside of AI.
Meta has been shedding workers while hiring new ones. As of June 30, Meta had 75,945 employees, up 7% year-over-year.
