Employees of Meta’s AI Superintelligence Labs have received bad news. A memo has broken it to them that 21 November will be the last working day for 600 members of the team. Until then they would be serving their notice period, during which they are free to look for other suitable positions within Meta, as they would not be expected to do any work for the company and would have no access to internal systems.
Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer, Meta, has assured support to the affected employees to find other suitable roles internally.
These layoffs come as a surprise considering that Meta had only just begun to invest more on artificial intelligence and had been hiring talent in the area. In fact, Meta had bought over Scale AI in a deal worth over $14 billion, as part of its AI-focussed investments. It had been poaching AI talent from other firms, including OpenAI and Apple.
The move is reported to impact team members of Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) AI research lab, as well as the AI product and infrastructure divisions, say media reports.
Wang’s internal memo reportedly also says that these layoffs will not affect hiring momentum because the company plans to continue hiring AI experts who can churn out more AI products and facilitate the faster progress of their plans.
