Meta to slash 600 AI jobs amid ongoing reorganization

Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer of Meta, wrote in a memo on Wednesday to the staff that the company will cut around 600 jobs from its superintelligent lab, according to an Axios report. 

The Menlo Park tech giant declined to comment, but confirmed to TechCrunch that Axios’ reporting is correct.

As AI is taking over the tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other companies are in a race to build the most powerful AI systems. Meta actively recruited this past summer, attracting over 50 researchers from competing companies with multi-million dollar compensation packages. However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that “none of (OpenAI’s) best people” accepted these offers.

“By lowering 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 noted in the memo to Meta staff.

This fits with the tech giant’s recent “year of efficiency,” which is just a nicer way of saying the company laid off a lot of people. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that being “leaner is better.”

Now, it seems that Meta isn’t lowering its overall headcount by much, but rather, reorganizing its efforts. The company claims that most of these people impacted today should be able to find another job within Meta.

However, it seems that Meta is not considering lowering its staff as compared to the overall headcount by much, but rather, reassembling its efforts. The tech titans assert that employees whose jobs were impacted today should be able to find another job within Meta.