• by Colin Kirkland , 9 hours ago

Following reports about Meta’s unprecedented investment in hiring top AI talent, the tech giant is planning surprising cuts to an estimated 600 jobs from its Superintelligence AI Labs division.

“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,” states Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, in a company memo.

In May, Meta divided its AI teams into two separate units in order to increase efficiency surrounding AI product development. Amid the restructuring, the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit was initially unaffected, but will now be directly reduced by this wave of job cuts.

Employees developing product-related AI and AI infrastructure will also face cuts, while the multimillion-dollar hires recently announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, including AI research and product company Thinking Machines’ co-founder Andrew Tulloch, will remain at the company.

The memo also states that the overall Superintelligence Labs structure will not be affected by these cuts, and Wang says most affected employees will be considered for other jobs at the company. 

Over the past year, Meta has invested heavily in the competitive AI race, spending $14.3 billion and acquiring a 49% stake in Scale AI, a startup that operates a global workforce of contractors who label images, text and video for machine learning applications, in order to secure the training data for its AI models. Wang was Scale AI’s previous CEO.

Along with strategic hiring, Meta has also pledged hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware to run its AI tech, its new multi-gigawatt data centers, and the quest for “superintelligence” capability. 

Last week, Meta also expanded its partnership with semiconductor design company Arm in order to gain global efficiency of its future AI systems.