Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is eliminating 600 roles in its AI division, US media reported. The company confirmed on Wednesday that it will remove around 600 artificial intelligence jobs while continuing to hire for its superintelligence lab.
FAIR Unit Faces Major Reductions
Axios revealed the job cuts, which affect Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team along with its product-focused AI and AI infrastructure divisions. The newer TBD Lab unit remains unaffected. Axios, citing a memo from chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, stated that Meta is urging displaced employees to apply for other internal positions. Most of the affected workers are expected to secure new roles within the company.
Wang wrote in the memo that smaller teams will improve decision-making and increase each member’s responsibility and influence. The California-based firm continues to recruit for TBD Lab, which develops Meta’s latest large language models (LLMs). These models power systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s own Llama.
Meta Pursues Open AI Strategy
Meta continues to pursue a distinct strategy in AI development. It released the Llama system as a semi-open source platform, allowing users to modify and apply its main components. The company reports that over one billion people use its AI tools every month. However, industry observers still view Meta as trailing behind OpenAI and Google in promoting public adoption of its language models.
