Meta will be making cuts on its team working on AI.

Superintelligence Labs

The New York Times reports that the tech company co-founded by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg was ramping up its effort to lead in AI, which caused it to take on more employees than needed, sources close to the matter explained. Now, 600 workers in its AI division, Superintelligence Labs, have been laid off.

Over the past three years, the company has been gearing up to compete with Google, OpenAI, and others, Axios reports.

“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg said on Threads on July 14. “We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.”

Meta Is Reportedly Laying Off 600 AI Workers

Teams specifically said to be impacted will be those working in Meta’s FAIR AI research, product-related AI, and AI infrastructure units, which is made up of several thousand workers. The cut will not impact newer hires from the TBD Lab, one of Superintelligence Labs’ four business groups, which specifically focuses on super intelligence and is still actively recruiting and hiring.

The cuts are intended to ensure the company can advance its products at a higher speed.

“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,” Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang wrote in a memo, according to another Axios report.

Those who have been laid off were informed at 7 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Oct. 22. Meta invites those employees to apply to other roles within its company and is hopeful most will be able to transition to a new team.

“This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company,” Wang said, according to Axios.