Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexander Wang, said in a memo to staff on Wednesday that the company would cut about 600 jobs from its Superintelligence Institute, Axios reported.
Meta declined to comment, but told TechCrunch that the Axios report is accurate.
Meta has had a busy summer on the hiring front as companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others compete to build the most powerful AI systems. The company poached more than 50 researchers from competitors with multimillion-dollar compensation packages, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that “none of the best people[at OpenAI]took the offer.”
“Reducing the size of our team reduces the conversations needed to make decisions, increases the burden on each person, and allows us to have more reach and influence,” Wang wrote in a memo to staff.
This idea is consistent with Meta’s recent “Year of Efficiency.” This is a more succinct expression of the company’s mass layoffs. At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that “the leaner the better.”
Currently, Meta is not significantly reducing its overall headcount, but rather appears to be reorganizing its efforts. The company claims that most of those affected today should be able to find other jobs within Meta.
