Meta is cutting 600 jobs in its AI division

Meta is cutting about 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence division as the tech giant seeks to move faster to compete with its rivals.

The company declined to comment on the job cuts but confirmed an earlier Axios report citing Wednesday. memo which Meta's director of artificial intelligence, Alexander Wang, sent to employees.

“By reducing the size of our team, decisions will require fewer conversations and each person will have more weight, power and influence,” the memo said.

The job cuts have hit workers at Meta's superintelligence laboratory, a unit that employs several thousand people. The company is working to give everyone “superintelligence”—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. July reminder.

Employees learned Wednesday whether they could lose their jobs. Those affected may apply for other roles.

The layoffs will not affect workers at Meta's newly created laboratory division, which will be announced at a later date, where distinguished researchers and engineers are working on the company's next generation of foundation models.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has doubled down on artificial intelligence efforts, spending billions of dollars on technology development initiatives.

The job cuts follow a recent hiring drive that included offering competitive compensation packages to attract top talent.

This year, Meta hired Wang from Scale AI, a San Francisco startup that helps label and annotate massive amounts of data used to train large language models.

The models enable the development of powerful artificial intelligence applications that people increasingly use to write code and perform other tasks. Wang founded Scale AI and was the startup's CEO before joining Meta. The company also invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI.

Meta was working on AI research before the release of OpenAI ChatGPT in 2022 started the race for AI dominance.

Competition is heating up, with tech giants like Google and Microsoft as well as smaller startups rapidly releasing new AI products and features.

Meta, based in Menlo Park, California, is also building new data centers and developing equipment such as smart glasses with artificial intelligence capabilities. He also introduced an AI application.

The development of artificial intelligence capable of performing tedious tasks has also increased anxiety among workers who fear their jobs may be automated.

Tech companies have continued to lay off workers this year, although executives have cited several reasons for job cuts outside of AI.

Meta fires employees and hires new ones. As of June 30, the company had 75,945 employees, up 7% from last year.