Meta plans to eliminate 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence departments

The American social media giant Meta—parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—announced this Wednesday that it plans to cut some 600 jobs in artificial intelligence (AI) departments, according to a memo sent to employees who collect local media.

Layoffs will occur in the so-called ‘Superintelligence Laboratories’ of Meta, a name that encompasses the company’s AI initiatives. The division has several thousand employees, although the exact number is unknown.

The layoffs seek “keep up with your competitors”collected by the specialized portal Axios and the newspaper The New York Times. According to the newspaper, the cuts are intended to “reduce the organizational overhead resulting from three years of developing Meta’s AI initiatives too quickly.”

Meanwhile, Axios points out that the memo emphasizes that with these cuts “fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will have a greater carrying capacity and greater reach and impact.”

The cuts come at a time of intense competition for Meta, which has spent the past three years grappling with the rapid expansion of AI. After the emergence of ChatGPT and OpenAI, Google and Microsoft They began hiring at a frenetic pace to develop the next generation of chatbots and other products.

Microsoft has pumped more than $13 billion into OpenAI, while Amazon has poured $8 billion into the artificial intelligence startup. Anthropic.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and president of Meta, created the company’s first dedicated artificial intelligence lab in 2013 (when it was called Facebook), after losing the opportunity to Google by trying to acquire a pioneering startup called DeepMind. This initiative is now the center of Google’s AI.

In June of this year, specialized media indicated that Zuckerberg was creating a new team of “superintelligence” dedicated to building the most advanced AI platform in the world – a hypothetical AI system that surpasses the capabilities of the human brain – in which it is investing enormous amounts of money.

The cuts announced this Wednesday They do not affect hiringaccording to The New York Timeslike Alexandr Wang, 28, who arrived at Meta this year after standing out as executive director of the artificial intelligence startup Scale AI.