Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence division, according to a memo sent to employees that was relayed to The New York Times, as the company seeks to keep pace with competitors in the furious contest over the technology.
The layoffs were in Meta’s so-called Superintelligence Labs, which is the umbrella name for the company’s A.I. efforts. The division has around 3,000 employees, though the exact number of workers was unclear.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has been on a hiring spree to stack his company with top A.I. researchers, including a new chief A.I. officer, Alexandr Wang, earlier this year. The cuts on Wednesday did not affect these newest hires, who have been empowered to develop “superintelligence,” or artificial intelligence that exceeds the human brain.
Instead, the job cuts were aimed at cleaning up the organizational bloat that resulted from three years of building up Meta’s A.I. efforts too quickly, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The layoffs aimed to help Meta develop A.I. products more rapidly, they said.
“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,” Mr. Wang wrote in the memo circulated to employees.
The cuts, which were earlier reported by Axios, came at an intensely competitive time for Meta, which has spent the past three years dealing with the rapid onset of A.I. After ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft hired furiously to build the next generation of A.I. chatbots and other products.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, struggled to keep up with the pack. After early success developing its open-source A.I. model, called Llama, its progress stagnated. The company went on a fresh hiring spree and made strategic errors, leading to product development issues over the past 18 months.
After a rocky first half of this year, Mr. Zuckerberg moved to restart the A.I. efforts. In June, he invested $14.3 billion in ScaleAI, an artificial intelligence start-up that was co-founded by Mr. Wang. Mr. Zuckerberg then brought ScaleAI’s top talent to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, including Mr. Wang.
Mr. Zuckerberg has since also spent billions recruiting top researchers from other A.I. labs and companies, including OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. Meta has dangled pay packages to some that number well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In August, Mr. Zuckerberg split Meta Superintelligence into four groups. One was called FAIR, which was focused on A.I. research; a second was working on superintelligence; another on products; and a fourth on infrastructure, such as data centers and other A.I. hardware.
After that restructuring, employees in the FAIR division scrambled to join Mr. Wang’s team, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The core team that Mr. Wang leads is made up of outside hires from companies like OpenAI and Google, though he has more recently brought on a few dozen A.I. researchers from other parts of Meta with specific expertise, they said.
The planned cuts will affect employees at FAIR, the product division and the infrastructure group, according to Mr. Wang’s memo. Employees who were laid off received emails by 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and the company plans to try to find other positions internally for those affected.
No cuts were made to TBD, the team building superintelligence and managing Meta’s large language models, which drive chatbots and other A.I. products, the people with knowledge of the situation said. The company is still hiring A.I. researchers in the TBD unit, which is managed by Mr. Wang, the people said.
Meta executives have emphasized that the cuts do not mean they are retrenching on A.I. efforts, and that superintelligence remains among Mr. Zuckerberg’s top priorities for the company.
In a sign of the escalating competition in A.I., Meta on Saturday also said it would cut off access to non-Meta chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year. That means WhatsApp’s three billion users will no longer be able to use ChatGPT in the messaging app.
In a statement, a Meta spokeswoman said the company made the change because OpenAI and other companies were using the third-party chatbot feature beyond the intended scope of customer service. OpenAI disputed Meta’s assertion.
On Wednesday, Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s vice president of science, posted on social media that it was “hard to believe Meta is shutting off 1-800-CHATGPT, which has many millions of happy users. If you’re one of them, you can migrate to our app, website, and browser to preserve your conversations.”
Mike Isaac is The Times’s Silicon Valley correspondent, based in San Francisco. He covers the world’s most consequential tech companies, and how they shape culture both online and offline.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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