Meta's Alexandr Wang on why the AI team just laid off 600 workers

5 hours ago 1

and Pranav Dixit

Meta is laying off 600 employees in its Meta Superintelligence Labs division.
Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, addressed the cuts in an internal memo.
Wang said the cuts would help the company to make decisions more quickly.

Meta is laying off 600 employees in its Meta Superintelligence Labs division, a spokesperson confirmed.

Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, shared a memo, which was seen by Business Insider, on Wednesday, announcing that the company cut jobs within the unit.

"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.

Wang also wrote that affected employees had been notified.

Meta didn't comment beyond the memo.

The restructuring comes as Meta fine-tunes its sprawling AI organization, which spans multiple groups, including product and research, infrastructure, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), and TBD, an elite division tasked with developing the company's next-generation AI models.

Meta established MSL in June to spearhead CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push toward what he has called "personal superintelligence," a term he uses to describe AI systems that could eventually surpass human capabilities.

The division has quickly become one of Meta's most important and expensive bets. In the last few months, Meta has spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring engineers and researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, and other companies.

Its rapid growth has also created internal friction, with overlapping mandates and shifting priorities leading to tensions and early staff departures.

These job cuts come amid Meta's move to "small, talent-dense teams," as Zuckerberg has described.

Read Wang's full memo below:

Earlier today, we made some changes to MSL to move us toward being the most agile and talent-dense team in the industry. 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.It's never an easy decision to say goodbye to colleagues. These are talented people who have worked extremely hard and contributed to our Al effort. Anyone in North America whose role was impacted has already been notified. Those who may be impacted in EMEA have been notified and remain subject to consultation.We are supporting the majority of those impacted in finding new roles at the company. We have spun up a tiger team of recruiters to help this group find the right match for their expertise and land in roles through an expedited hiring process.This by no means signals any decrease in investment. In fact, we will continue to hire industry-leading Al-native talent. Our goal is to enable MSL to move faster. We remain excited about the models we are training, our ambitious compute plans, and the products we are building, and I'm confident in our path to superintelligence.

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