Employees from Meta’s FAIR and AI infrastructure teams are among those impacted.
Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman, remains unaffected.
Zuckerberg is reportedly pushing for faster AI progress after Llama 4’s lukewarm reception.
Meta is laying off around 600 employees from its artificial intelligence division as part of streamlining operations and eliminating redundancy, as per company spokesperson. For the unversed, Meta has been in the headlines for poaching talent with massive packages from competitors like OpenAI, Microsoft and more.
SurveyThe layoffs were announced in an internal memo by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined the company in June after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI. The cuts are said to affect employees from the company’s AI infrastructure teams, the Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) division, and product-oriented AI roles.
Interestingly, employees at Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs, led by Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, have been spared. According to reports, Zuckerberg’s decision places his high-profile new hires ahead of the company’s legacy AI teams.
As per the reports, insiders describe Meta’s AI unit as having become “bloated” in recent years, with overlapping roles and competition for computing resources between research and product teams. The restructuring aims to organise the team under Wang’s direction and align with Meta’s long term AI roadmap.
Following the job cuts, Meta’s Superintelligence Labs’ workforce is now estimated to be slightly less than 3,000. Employees affected were informed that their official termination date is November 21, and that they will be paid “non-working notice” until that date. Meta is offering 16 weeks of severance pay, with an additional two weeks for each year of service.
The layoffs come at a time when Zuckerberg is reportedly dissatisfied with the company’s AI progress, particularly following the lukewarm reception of Meta’s Llama 4 models earlier this year. Since then, the company has stepped up its AI investments, including new infrastructure projects and leadership changes.
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Ashish Singh
Ashish Singh is the Chief Copy Editor at Digit. He's been wrangling tech jargon since 2020 (Times Internet, Jagran English '22). When not policing commas, he's likely fueling his gadget habit with coffee, strategising his next virtual race, or plotting a road trip to test the latest in-car tech. He speaks fluent Geek. View Full Profile
