Meta to axe hundreds of AI jobs after offering $100m signing bonuses

Meta is to cut 600 artificial intelligence (AI) jobs after a hiring spree in which the Facebook owner offered signing bonuses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The social media giant will cut staff from its new superintelligence division, which has several thousand employees, with the lay-offs primarily affecting managers and members of its Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (Fair) unit.

It comes after a multibillion-dollar hiring spree personally led by Meta’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder scooped up dozens of talented AI researchers from rivals by dangling vast bonuses and share deals, with some worth north of $100m (£75m).

Meta reportedly even offered a $1bn deal to one executive, Andrew Tulloch, the co-founder of Thinking Machines, an AI start-up. Meta disputed the size of the alleged deal, calling it “ridiculous”.

The pay deals have been seen as an indication of the exuberance in the tech sector amid concerns over an AI bubble. Mr Zuckerberg has promised to spend $65bn this year alone to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer.

Mr Zuckerberg also hired Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive of Scale AI, this year to lead its “superintelligence” team. The deal saw Meta take a 49pc stake in Scale AI for $14.3bn.

The job cuts will reportedly fall heavily on Meta’s Fair division, which previously led much of its fundamental AI research. The lab has already lost its head, Joelle Pineau, who quit earlier this year to join AI start-up Cohere.

While Meta’s Fair team led the original work on the company’s AI technology, known as Llama, Mr Zuckerberg has this year repeatedly shaken up and restructured its AI division, delaying the release of a new technology amid concerns over its performance.

‘Small, talent-dense teams’

Mr Wang has since been tasked with leading Meta’s renewed AI push, and Mr Zuckerberg has sought to concentrate on working with a smaller, core team.

In July, Mr Zuckerberg said: “I’ve just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small, talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research.”

However, the first products from Meta’s new superintelligence team have been met with criticism. An AI video app it launched, called Vibes, was derided as an “infinite slop machine”.

“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,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, said in a note to staff. Axios first reported the memo.

Some of the staff will be offered roles in other parts of the business. “This is a talented group of individuals, and we need their skills in other parts of the company,” Mr Wang said.

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