Meta is cutting 600 jobs in its AI division

Meta is slashing astir 600 jobs successful its artificial quality portion arsenic the tech elephantine aims to determination faster to vie with its rivals.

The institution declined to remark connected the occupation cuts, but confirmed an earlier study by Axios, which cited a Wednesday memo that Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang sent to employees.

“By reducing the size of our team, less conversations volition beryllium required to marque a decision, and each idiosyncratic volition beryllium much load-bearing and person much scope and impact,” the memo said.

The occupation cuts deed workers successful Meta’s superintelligence lab, a part that has respective 1000 employees. The institution is moving to bring “superintelligence” — AI that surpasses quality quality — to everyone, Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said successful a July memo.

Employees learned Wednesday whether they could suffer their jobs. Those affected tin use for different roles.

The layoffs won’t impact workers wrong Meta’s recently formed TBD Lab Unit wherever salient researchers and engineers are moving connected the company’s next-generation instauration models.

Meta, the genitor institution of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been doubling down connected its AI efforts, spending billions of dollars connected initiatives to beforehand technology.

The occupation cuts travel a caller hiring spree, which progressive offering lucrative compensation packages to enlistee apical talent.

This year, Meta hired Wang from Scale AI, a San Francisco startup that helps statement and annotate the monolithic trove of information utilized to bid ample connection models.

The models alteration the improvement of almighty AI applications that radical are progressively utilizing to write, codification and assistance with different tasks. Wang founded Scale AI and was the startup’s main enforcement earlier joining Meta. The institution besides invested $14.3 cardinal successful Scale AI.

Meta has been moving connected AI probe earlier the 2022 merchandise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT acceptable disconnected a contention to predominate artificial intelligence.

The contention has been heating up, with tech giants specified arsenic Google and Microsoft and smaller startups rapidly releasing caller AI products and feature.

Meta, based successful Menlo Park, Calif., has besides been gathering retired caller information centers and processing hardware specified arsenic smartglasses with AI features. It has besides introduced an AI app.

The emergence of artificial quality that tin implicit tedious tasks has besides accrued anxiousness among workers who fearfulness their jobs could get automated.

Tech companies person continued to laic disconnected workers this twelvemonth though executives person pointed to respective reasons for occupation cuts extracurricular AI.

Meta has been shedding workers portion hiring caller ones. As of June 30, the institution had 75,945 employees, up 7% year-over-year.