Meta to cut 600 jobs from its artificial intelligence division

Meta is cutting roughly 600 artificial intelligence (AI) jobs even as it continues to hire more workers for its superintelligence lab, the company confirmed on Wednesday.

Axios first reportedthe cuts, which will affect Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR unit, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure units.

Its newer TBD Lab unit won’t be affected. Citing a memo sent to workers by chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, Axios said the company is encouraging employees affected to apply for other jobs at Meta, with most expected to find other roles.

"By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact," Wang wrote in the memo, Axios reported.

The California-based company is also still recruiting and hiring for TBD Lab, which is developing Meta's latest large language models (LLMs). Large language models are the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama.

Meta has taken a different approach to AI than many of its rivals, releasing its flagship Llama system for free as a semi-open source product that enables people to use and modify some of its key components.

Meta says more than one billion people use its AI products each month, but it’s also widely seen as lagging behind competitors such as OpenAI and Google in encouraging consumer use of LLMs.