Months after Mark Zuckerberg spent billions building Meta’s dream team for its “AI Superintelligence” project, the company is now trimming the same workforce. Around 600 employees from Meta’s AI division are being laid off in what the company calls an efficiency move.
Meta’s AI Superintelligence Labs will cut around 600 employees this week, according to a Bloomberg report citing an internal memo. The layoffs come just months after Meta’s aggressive hiring spree, which saw the company poach top talent from rivals like Apple, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The cuts, announced internally on October 22, are aimed at “increasing efficiency and reducing bureaucracy,” said Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. “By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing,” Wang wrote in the memo, as per the report by Bloomberg.
Interestingly, Meta’s newly formed TBD Lab — which includes many of its highest-paid new recruits — remains untouched. The company has encouraged affected employees to apply for roles in other departments and said it will continue hiring selectively for key AI positions.
The layoffs follow an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal that Meta had frozen AI hiring in August, with the company later describing it as “basic organisational planning.”
Meta’s AI ambitions have come at a steep price. The company reportedly invested Rs 1.2 lakh crore ($14.3 billion) in Scale AI, a data labelling startup led by Wang, to accelerate its superintelligence efforts. Reports have also suggested Meta offered pay packages of up to Rs 800 crore ($100 million) to lure AI experts from competitors.
For now, Meta insists the layoffs are a restructuring move — not a retreat from its high-stakes bet on artificial intelligence.
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