Meta is cutting around 600 jobs from its newly formed superintelligence division as the company reorganizes its sprawling artificial intelligence operations, signaling a shift toward smaller, faster teams in what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
In a memo to staff on Wednesday, Meta’s chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, said the restructuring was meant to make the team “more agile and talent-dense” as the company pursues its ambitious goal of building “personal superintelligence” — a term Zuckerberg uses to describe AI systems that could eventually surpass human capabilities.
“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.
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The layoffs mark one of the most significant reorganizations within Meta’s AI division since the company established the Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL) in June. The division was designed to spearhead research into next-generation AI models, consolidating engineers and scientists from multiple Meta units — including Facebook AI Research (FAIR), infrastructure, and product teams — under one structure.
Meta has described MSL as a cornerstone of its long-term AI strategy, with Zuckerberg pledging billions of dollars in compute and talent to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The company has been aggressively recruiting since mid-2024, offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to lure researchers from rival firms.
Over the summer, Meta poached more than 50 scientists and engineers from competitors, including OpenAI and Google, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed the departures. “None of our best people took the offers,” Altman said at the time.
Despite the hiring spree, the rapid growth of MSL has created internal strain. Current and former employees have described overlapping mandates and shifting priorities that led to confusion and tension across Meta’s broader AI organization. Several senior researchers reportedly left within months of joining.
The latest cuts appear aimed at resolving that internal friction by consolidating roles and tightening coordination. Wang’s memo said the reorganization would allow the division to “move faster” and empower each remaining team member to have greater influence.
“These are talented people who have worked extremely hard and contributed to our AI effort,” Wang wrote. “We are supporting the majority of those impacted in finding new roles at the company.”
He added that Meta had formed a “tiger team of recruiters” to help displaced employees quickly transition into new positions within the company.
Meta said the restructuring does not meaningfully reduce its overall headcount, as many of those affected are expected to be rehired in other AI or engineering roles.
The company’s move fits into a broader philosophy articulated by Zuckerberg since early 2023, when he began describing Meta’s “year of efficiency” as a way to make the company “leaner is better.” That initiative led to tens of thousands of job cuts across divisions, aimed at flattening management layers and improving decision speed.
In the case of the superintelligence lab, the goal appears to be organizational streamlining rather than cost-cutting.
“Our goal is to enable MSL to move faster,” Wang wrote, emphasizing that Meta’s investment in compute and AI infrastructure would continue. “We remain excited about the models we are training, our ambitious compute plans, and the products we are building, and I’m confident in our path to superintelligence.”
The superintelligence project has become one of Meta’s most expensive bets, with the company investing hundreds of millions of dollars to scale its compute clusters and train large AI models. Meta’s AI ambitions span multiple fronts — from the consumer-facing “Meta AI” assistant integrated into its apps to foundational models powering future augmented and virtual reality experiences.
Zuckerberg has framed AI as central to Meta’s long-term future, positioning the company as a challenger to OpenAI and Google in both research and product deployment.
“We want to build general intelligence openly and responsibly,” he said earlier this year. “Our goal is to make it available to everyone as widely as possible.”
Wang’s memo reflects that same ethos of aggressive efficiency paired with scale. His remarks echo a recurring theme across Meta’s AI units — that smaller, specialized teams are better suited to innovate in a field moving at unprecedented speed.
The restructuring also comes at a time when competition among leading AI companies has intensified. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are each training new frontier models that require massive amounts of compute power, driving a surge in demand for Nvidia chips and data center capacity.
Within this race, Meta has sought to differentiate itself by emphasizing open research and democratized access to its AI tools, including the Llama family of open-source models. The company recently launched Llama 3, which has been widely adopted by developers and integrated into several enterprise systems.
Still, internal tensions have emerged as Meta expands its ambitions beyond open-source models to the more exclusive superintelligence project, where research secrecy and proprietary models are expected to play a larger role. Some researchers reportedly expressed unease over the shift toward confidentiality and the heavy emphasis on rapid scaling.
Wang’s decision to trim the MSL workforce underscores the company’s effort to stabilize the division’s structure and clarify its direction after a summer of intense hiring and shifting goals. Analysts see the move as a sign that Meta is entering a more disciplined phase in its AI race — focusing on execution rather than expansion.
While the exact financial impact of the restructuring remains unclear, Meta insists that the investment pipeline for its AI research remains intact.
“This by no means signals any decrease in investment,” Wang reiterated. “We will continue to hire industry-leading AI-native talent.”