"In a move that bucks the tech industry's trend of aggressively hiring workers who specialize in artificial intelligence, Meta is slashing about 600 employees from its closely watched AI efforts, per reports on Wednesday. Axios first published the news, which was then confirmed by Meta to TechCrunch and the Verge. The Menlo Park tech giant's layoffs will hit three parts of its four-part AI unit, by cutting workers from its legacy AI research team and from product and infrastructure units focused on AI."
"Meta announced the cuts in a memo from Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, Axios reported. It parroted a go-to layoff reasoning from CEO Mark Zuckerberg - that smaller teams are better for the company. "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 reportedly wrote in the note. Employees learned before 7 a.m. on Wednesday whether they'd lose their jobs, Axios reported."
Meta is eliminating roughly 600 positions across three of the four segments of its AI unit, cutting legacy AI research and product and infrastructure teams. The small TBD Lab focused on advanced AI models will not be affected. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang framed the move as making teams smaller to reduce decision overhead and increase individual impact. Some affected employees entered a "non-working notice period" and could use the time to pursue other roles at the company, with severance packages offering at least 16 weeks of pay. The cuts may also reduce costs amid high AI hardware spending and large projected expenses for 2025.
Read at SFGATE
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]