Meta had been offering $100 million bonuses to get top AI researchers to join its ranks, but it now seems to just just as rapidly culling the non-star researchers on its teams.
Meta has laid off 600 employees from its Artificial Intelligence unit. The company announced the cuts in a memo from its chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions will be impacted.
“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 to employees. The layoffs didn’t impact the newly-built TBD labs, which now houses some of Meta’s recent star acquisitions from rival labs. “I’m really excited about the models we’re training, our compute plans and the products we’re building, and I’m confident in our path to build towards superintelligence,” Wang said in the memo.
Meta notified at least some employees on Wednesday that November 21 was their termination date and until then they were in a “non-working notice period.” “During this time, your internal access will be removed and you do not need to do any additional work for Meta,” said the message. “You may use this time to search for another role at Meta.” The company also said it’s paying 16 weeks of severance plus two weeks for every completed year of service, “minus your notice period.”
This prompted many Meta employees to take to X to look to find new roles. “Several of my team members + myself are impacted by this layoff today. Welcome to connect :)” wrote Yuandong Tian.
A poll on anonymous workplace app Blind showed at least 47 employees said that they’d been laid off from different departments within Meta’s AI division.
Other researchers also spoke about how they were laid off, and were looking for other opportunities.
Meta has looked to overhaul its AI division after it fell behind in the AI race with the failure of Llama 4. Meta had been releasing powerful open models under the Llama brand which were seeing broad adoption, but after Llama 4 ended up not performing as per expectations, it has largely fallen off the AI map. This seems to have prompted Mark Zuckerberg to take drastic action — he acquired a large stake in Scale AI for over $14 billion, and made its founder, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, the head of its AI division. Since joining Meta, Wang has poached several top researchers from rival labs such as OpenAI, allegedly for sums of money ranging upwards of $100 million. Simultaneously, Wang has been leading layoffs in Meta’s broader AI division, which was seen to be bloated and inefficient.
Thus far, Meta doesn’t have much to show for its restructuring. Since the reorg, Meta has released a single product, an AI video generation app named Vibes on its Meta AI platform. But the product hasn’t made a big splash, with OpenAI’s Sora, which was released several weeks later, ending up going viral for its realistic short videos. It remains to be seen when Meta’s AI engine begins firing, but given all the money that’s being spent, and the big reorganizations, Mark Zuckerberg will hope that it’s sooner rather than later.