What just happened? Being an AI expert might come with a healthy pay packet, but the position isn't immune to the tech industry's constant layoffs. About 600 employees within Meta's artificial-intelligence groups are being let go, a move the company says will streamline operations and remove layers in the decision-making process.

Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, confirmed the layoffs and that affected employees have been notified. Workers in Meta's legacy Fundamental AI Research unit (FAIR) and its AI product and infrastructure division will be affected.

It's important to note that the layoffs have not affected Meta's recently formed TBD Labs, an elite team inside Meta Superintelligence Labs focused on building its next-generation foundation models. Wang leads the division. He was hired after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, where he was CEO.

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"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 in a memo to staff.

The move is part of Meta's attempts to make its sprawling AI organization less bloated and more efficient.

Alexandr Wang, center

Meta has spared no expense when it comes to securing the best AI researchers in the business. Earlier this year, the company dangled nine-figure packages to poach elite researchers – often structured as huge equity/sign-on grants – part of its push to recruit for the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) / TBD Labs. OpenAI boss Sam Altman said at the time that Meta offered $100 million signing bonuses to try and lure his employees.

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However, just weeks after announcing the formation of the superintelligence research team, Meta put a pause on AI hiring. It also reorganized the division, splitting it into four groups focused on AI research, infrastructure and hardware, AI products, and superintelligence. It was reported at that time that Meta wanted to downsize its AI business.

One of the researchers laid off by Meta was Xianjun Yang, who has been looking for new employment on X. Noting that his work has been cited by John Schulman of the Thinking Machine Lab and Nicholas Carlini of Anthropic in their paper "Detecting Adversarial Fine-Tuning With Auditing Agents," Yang has already received positive responses from Apple, X, xAI, Salesforce, AMD, and other big tech firms.