Mark Zuckerberg cuts nearly 600 AI experts

Meta has been hiring heavily in the AI field in recent times, but is now cutting back to find ways to increase efficiency. Photo: Reuters .

Meta said in a memo to employees on October 22 that it had cut about 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence division as it tries to catch up with rivals in the fierce competition over this technology.

The layoffs occurred at Superintelligence Labs, the umbrella name for the company’s AI efforts. The division has about 3,000 employees, though the exact number was not disclosed.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has been actively recruiting top AI experts in recent times, including appointing Alexandr Wang as its new Chief AI Officer earlier this year. These people are being empowered to develop “artificial superintelligence” that surpasses the human brain and is not on the cut list.

The personnel changes are aimed at streamlining the cumbersome apparatus due to the rapid acceleration of the group's AI development, according to the NYT. They said the goal is to help Meta develop AI products faster.

“By reducing the size of the team, fewer conversations are needed to make decisions, and each individual will shoulder more responsibility, have a larger scope of influence and impact,” Mr. Wang wrote in a note to employees.

Meta's cuts come amid fierce competition, according to Axios . The company has spent the past three years trying to keep up with the AI boom since ChatGPT launched in 2022. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have been hiring aggressively to build the next generation of chatbots and AI products.

After early success with its open-source AI model Llama, Meta’s progress began to slow. The company continued to hire aggressively but made several strategic mistakes that led to a series of problems in product development over the past 18 months.

In June, Mark Zuckerberg invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI, the artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Mr. Wang, to bring in top talent. Meta’s CEO has continued to spend billions of dollars to recruit top researchers from other AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.

In August, Zuckerberg divided Meta Superintelligence into four groups: research (called FAIR), superintelligence, product applications, and AI infrastructure. According to Wang, the upcoming staff cuts will affect employees at FAIR, the product division, and the infrastructure group.

The laid-off employees were notified by email before 10 a.m. local time on October 22. The company said it would work to find suitable internal positions for those on the list.

There are no cuts to the team responsible for building artificial intelligence and managing Meta's large language models, which are the foundation for chatbots and other AI products. The company is even still recruiting AI researchers for TBD, the name of the division, which Mr. Wang manages.

Meta executives stressed that the layoffs don't mean they're scaling back their AI efforts. Artificial superintelligence remains a top priority.

Source: https://znews.vn/mark-zuckerberg-cat-giam-gan-600-chuyen-gia-ai-post1596238.html