Meta To Cut 600 Jobs In AI Division To Streamline Operations
Meta launched a “year of efficiency” campaign in 2023, aiming for “fewer conversations, more load-bearing roles”. In an interview with CNBC, Meta’s spokesperson stated that “Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly.”
On October 22, they sent notifications to their employees. This nonworking notice will end on November 21. Meta took this step to reduce the organizational anxiety within its superintelligent labs. They are going to make the AI units more focused under the supervision of Chief AI Alexander Wang. He stated that “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.”
AI Division Grew Too Fast: Hiring Spree Now Reversed
Growing division with overlapping roles and slow decision-making cycles pushed Meta to halt the hiring process. The company appointed Alexander Wang in June and aims to consolidate control under his leadership, creating more empowered and focused systems.
Their core focus is leadership clarity, efficiency mandate, and acceleration of execution. They redirect the resources from relatively low-impact roles toward high-impact teams. Their TBD lab-like projects, which are developing frontier AI models, are the main investment focus because they will position Meta as an AI giant in the market.
In the second and third quarters of 2025, Meta aggressively hired over 50 researchers from top companies like Google, OpenAI, and Apple. They allocated a $5M–$10M per hire, including equity and bonuses. In May 2025, the company appointed Alexander Wang to unify AI strategy across infrastructure, product, and research.
Meta received internal feedback about issues such as the presence of “redundant roles” and a “slow execution cycle,” which are causing hurdles in proper and smooth functioning. Meta’s FAIR team’s mandate has reportedly overlapped with TBD lab, so this cut is actually a consolidation. It’s not a budget cut because Meta is still hiring for the TBD lab, which is focused on multimodal systems and next-gen AI models.
Meta’s AI Focus Shifts to High-Impact Labs and Competitive Edge
Meta described its TBD lab as “an elite frontier AI unit,” and it doesn’t suffer from any cut. Still, it’s progressing, hiring more employees, and model deployment is ongoing. Meta wants faster iteration and a broader scope for each role. Companies want to reduce functional layering to simplify the whole operation.
It will also give Meta a competitive edge over other tech companies like DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI, among others. According to an Axios report, “The company concluded that its long-standing AI efforts had become overly bureaucratic and hopes the reorganization will create a more agile operation.”
Meta has already deployed its GenAI tools across Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. However, the next move is to integrate frontier models into consumer products by the second quarter of 2026. Till the end of this year, Meta planned to build an AI infrastructure to support 600K+ H100 GPUs. They actually want to reduce model latency by 40% across all platforms.
Alexander Wang stated that “We need fewer people with more impact.”
