As part of its continued “year of efficiency,” Meta restructures AI teams to streamline decision-making, even after aggressively hiring top talent from rivals.
Meta Trims AI Team Despite Recent Hiring Spree
Meta is laying off around 600 employees from its superintelligence lab, according to a memo by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang shared with staff on Wednesday. The news, first reported by Axios, was confirmed as accurate by Meta to TechCrunch, though the company declined to provide further public comment.
The cuts reflect Meta’s ongoing internal restructuring efforts rather than a broad reduction in AI investments. The company says it aims to improve agility and increase individual impact within its AI organization.
“Fewer Conversations, More Impact”
In his memo, Wang framed the layoffs as a step toward more focused execution:
“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.”
This philosophy echoes CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency”, during which Meta carried out mass layoffs and cost-cutting measures. The goal, according to Zuckerberg, was to make Meta “leaner is better”—a mantra that appears to now apply to its most advanced AI research teams.
A Surprising Turn After Hiring Surge
The layoffs are particularly notable given Meta’s aggressive hiring strategy over the summer. The company attracted more than 50 AI researchers from rivals like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, often offering multimillion-dollar compensation packages.
Despite the high-profile talent grab, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that “none of [OpenAI’s] best people” were lured away by Meta’s offers.
Now, just months later, Meta is slimming down the very teams it worked so hard to build, in what appears to be a strategic realignment rather than a financial pullback.
Not All Jobs Lost
While 600 roles are being cut, Meta has indicated that most affected employees will have the opportunity to find new roles within the company. This reinforces the idea that the reorganization is structural, rather than a wholesale retreat from superintelligent AI efforts.
It’s a signal that Meta is redistributing its AI talent to align with new priorities, rather than downsizing its ambition in the AI race.
AI Reorg in a Competitive Landscape
The move comes as major players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic aggressively scale up efforts to develop frontier AI models. Meta has openly declared its goal to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) and recently consolidated its AI teams under a single vision.
With supercomputing infrastructure, open-source AI models, and ambitious product integration on the horizon, Meta is betting that a leaner team can move faster—especially as AI breakthroughs increasingly hinge on both scale and speed.
