Just weeks ago Mark Zuckerberg‘s Superintelligence Labs unit was in news for hiring AI researchers at $100 million pay packages. So much so that, Meta’s AI division started talent war in Silicon Valley, poaching AI engineers from rivals including Google, Apple and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI at multi-million-dollar salary packages. Nobody in the talent race for AI researchers has been chasing the prized recruits quite like Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meta CEO Zuckerberg is said to have tried to raid Silicon Valley’s top research labs, dangling $100 million pay packages for Superintelligence Labs.And after this ‘expensive’ hiring, Meta is laying off 600 employees in its Meta Superintelligence Labs division. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the news. Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, shared a memo, which was seen by Business Insider, 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.
Here’s the memo sent by Alexandr Wang to employees of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs
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.
