A spokesperson informed CNBC on Wednesday that Meta will lay off approximately 600 employees in its artificial intelligence department as the company seeks to streamline its operations to act more quickly.
The announcements of the cuts were made in a memo by the Chief AI Officer of Meta, Alexandr Wang, who was recruited in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI.
The employees of the AI infrastructure departments of Meta, including the Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other jobs relating to products, will be affected.
People familiar with the matter reported to CNBC that the layoffs did not affect the staff at TBD Labs, which encompasses top-tier AI recruits hired into the social media company this summer.
Some of them stated that the layoffs did not apply to those workers managed by Wang, highlighting the bet made by Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on his costly hires over the legacy workers.
It was reported that the AI unit was considered bloated within Meta. Groups such as FAIR and more product-oriented units often competed over computing resources.
When Meta’s new hires entered the company to establish Superintelligence Labs, it inherited a large AI unit.
The layoffs can be viewed as an attempt by Meta to further streamline the department and consolidate the position of Wang to lead the AI strategy of the company.
Over the last few months, Meta has been dramatically rethinking its AI strategy as it tries to keep up with its competitors, such as OpenAI and Google, and invests billions of dollars in infrastructure and hiring efforts.
Since the reductions, the employees of Superintelligence Labs at Meta are now slightly less than 3,000.
At least some employees were informed by Meta on Wednesday that they would be terminated on November 21 and that until that date, they are in a “non-working notice period.”
According to the message, observed by CNBC that “During this time, your internal access will be removed, and you do not need to do any additional work for Meta. You may use this time to search for another role at Meta.”
The company added that it is providing 16 weeks of severance and two weeks per year of service completion “minus your notice period.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was frustrated by the progress of AI at Meta, particularly when the launch of its Llama 4 models in April was met with a mixed response by developers.
After investing heavily in the company through Scale AI, Zuckerberg announced a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs that consists of some of the best AI researchers and engineers. Meanwhile, Wang and former GitHub chief Nat Friedman lead the group.
Meta announced in its second-quarter earnings call in July that its total costs in 2025 will be in the range of $114 billion to $118 billion, increasing the lower end of its forecast.
This figure is predicted to keep rising, with Meta indicating that the AI projects will “result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth.”
Meta is anticipated to report third-quarter results next week. Meta has declared a $27-billion agreement with Blue Owl Capital to finance and develop its giant Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana.
In a post, Zuckerberg stated that it is assumed that the data center will have a large scale that will “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.” However, the layoffs were initially reported by Axios.
