Meta is laying off approximately 600 employees in its artificial intelligence division as part of a broader effort to streamline operations.
The cuts, first reported by Axios, target Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, including its Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit, AI product division, and AI infrastructure teams. The recently formed TBD Lab, focused on next-generation large language models, remains unaffected.
Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, announced the layoffs in an internal memo, framing them as a restructuring to boost efficiency.
“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.
He added, “This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company.”
Affected U.S. employees were notified by 7 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, with a termination date of November 21. Until then, they enter a “non-working notice period” with internal access revoked.
“During this time, your internal access will be removed, and you do not need to do any additional work for Meta,” the memo stated, CNBC reported.
Employees are encouraged to apply for other roles within Meta, with severance set at 16 weeks plus two weeks per year of service, minus the notice period.
The layoffs follow Meta’s aggressive AI investments, including a $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI in June, when Wang was hired to lead the division. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, frustrated by lackluster progress after the April release of Llama 4 models, launched the Superintelligence Labs under Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. Meta also recruited talent from rivals like OpenAI, including researcher Ananya Kumar and Andrew Tulloch of Thinking Machines.
“I’m really excited about the models we’re training, our compute plans, and the products we’re building, and I’m confident in our path to build towards superintelligence,” Wang said.
The cuts come as Meta projects 2025 expenses of $114 billion to $118 billion, with AI initiatives driving costs higher into 2026.
On Tuesday, Meta announced a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital for its Hyperion data center in Louisiana, described by Zuckerberg as covering “a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”
Third-quarter earnings are due next week.