Meta's Alexandr Wang on why the AI team just laid off 600 workers
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .
Meta is laying off 600 employees in its Meta Superintelligence Labs division, a spokesperson confirmed.
Meta's chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, shared a memo, which was seen by Business Insider, on Wednesday, announcing that the company cut jobs within the unit.
"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 wrote.
Wang also wrote that affected employees had been notified.
Meta didn't comment beyond the memo.
The restructuring comes as Meta fine-tunes its sprawling AI organization, which spans multiple groups, including product and research, infrastructure, Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), and TBD, an elite division tasked with developing the company's next-generation AI models.
Meta established MSL in June to spearhead CEO Mark Zuckerberg's push toward what he has called "personal superintelligence," a term he uses to describe AI systems that could eventually surpass human capabilities.
The division has quickly become one of Meta's most important and expensive bets. In the last few months, Meta has spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring engineers and researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Apple, and other companies.
Its rapid growth has also created internal friction, with overlapping mandates and shifting priorities leading to tensions and early staff departures.
These job cuts come amid Meta's move to "small, talent-dense teams," as Zuckerberg has described.
Read Wang's full memo below:
Earlier today, we made some changes to MSL to move us toward being the most agile and talent-dense team in the industry. 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. It's never an easy decision to say goodbye to colleagues. These are talented people who have worked extremely hard and contributed to our Al effort. Anyone in North America whose role was impacted has already been notified. Those who may be impacted in EMEA have been notified and remain subject to consultation. We are supporting the majority of those impacted in finding new roles at the company. We have spun up a tiger team of recruiters to help this group find the right match for their expertise and land in roles through an expedited hiring process. This by no means signals any decrease in investment. In fact, we will continue to hire industry-leading Al-native talent. Our goal is to enable MSL to move faster. We remain excited about the models we are training, our ambitious compute plans, and the products we are building, and I'm confident in our path to superintelligence.
Have a tip? Contact these reporters via email at , jmann@businessinsider.com or pdixit@insider.com . Reach out via Signal at jyotimann.11 or pranavdixit.04. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
Read next
Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at pdixit@insider.com or pranavdixit@protonmail.com. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .