Meta to lay off roughly 600 employees within AI unit

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced plans to lay off around 600 employees within its artificial intelligence (AI) unit.

The layoffs, as first reported by Axios, will remove the roughly 600 roles from within Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division.

Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, rationalized the layoffs in an internal memo, stating: “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 also confirmed that the company is helping affected employees find other jobs within Meta, according to Axios.

“This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company,” he wrote.

The layoffs come as Meta continues to look to enhance its AI output and is still actively recruiting for its TBD Lab unit, “an elite division tasked with developing the company’s next-generation AI models,” Business Insider reported.