by ceejayoz
34 subcomments
- Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't?
> ”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 writes in a memo seen by Axios.
That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
- > while the company continues to hire workers for its newly formed superintelligence team, TBD Lab.
It's coming any day now!
> "... each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes
It's only a matter of time before the superintelligence decides to lay off the managers too. Soon Mr. Wang will be gone and we'll see press releases like:
> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, so the logical step I took was to reduce the team size to 0" ... AI superintelligence, which now runs Meta, declared in an interview with Axios.
- Guaranteed this is them cleaning out the old guard, its either axe them, or watch a brutal political game between legacy employees and new LLM AI talent
- Every time I see news like this, I just try to focus more on working on things I think are meaningful and contributing positively to the world... there is so much out of our control but what is in our control is how we use our minds and what we believe in.
- Meta is fumbling hard. Winning the AI race is about marketing at this point - the difference between the models is negligible.
Chat GPT is the one on everyone's lips outside of technology, and in the media. They have a platform by which to push some kind of assistant but where is it? I log into facebook and it's buried in the sidebar as Meta AI. Why aren't they shoving it down my throat? They have a huge platform of advertisers who'd be more than happy to inject ads into the AI. (I should note I hope they don't do this - but it's inevitable).
- Lots of companies spun up giant AI teams over the last 48 months. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 50+% of these roles are eliminated in the next 48 months.
The AI party is coming to an end. Those without clear ROI are ripe for the chopping block.
- I’m kind of surprised Wang is leading AI at Meta? His knowledge is around data labeling which is important sure but is he really the guy to take this to the next level?
by cmuguythrow
2 subcomments
- If this impacted you - we are hiring at Magnetic (AI doc scanning and workflow automation for CPA firms). Cool technical problems, building a senior, co-located team in SF to have fun and build a great product from scratch
https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30776/jobs
- “If I work in/with AI my job will be safe” isn’t true after all.
- I think this is because older AI doesn't get done what LLM AI does. Older AI = normal trained models, neural networks (without transformers), support vector machines, etc. For that reason, they are letting them go. They don't see revenue coming from that. They don't see new product lines (like AI Generative image/video). AI may have this every 5 years. A break through moves the technology into an entirely new area. Then older teams have to re-train, or have a harder time.
- my take:
Meta’s leadership and dysfunctional culture failed to nurture talent. To fix that, they started throwing billions of $ at hiring from outside desperately.
And now they're relying on these newcomers to purge the old Meta styled employees and by extension the culture they'd promoted.
- Based on conversations with some affected friends, there was layoffs outside of the Meta AI org today too. Not sure if this 600 number is representative of how many people were actually let go by Meta today.
One friend told me she feels every time you reapply internally, as the newest team member you end up first on the chopping block for the next round of cuts anyway as no time to make impact, she will just take the redundancy money this time. Lots of Meta employees now just expect such rounds of job cuts prior to earning calls and she has had enough of the stress.
- Wang doesn’t strike me as an inspiring AI leader, and Meta’s AI leadership and strategy feel unclear.
Hopefully they’ll address that soon, because in the meantime OpenAI is executing and shipping.
by curvaturearth
0 subcomment
- If Facebook would lay off jamming all the AI features in my face that would be nice. Applies to basically all big tech really.
by kaycey2022
0 subcomment
- The 100 million $ AI guy will end up buying/cooking his own lunch at this rate
by SoftTalker
2 subcomments
- > Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company
How gracious.
- Better to link to the source: https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-...
by Argonaut998
0 subcomment
- DeepSeek obliterated Meta’s AI and their strategy. Even now there are alternatives to DeepSeek like Qwen. I don’t know how they will recover from it. I don’t know what they can offer other than additional ham fisted AI integration into their products, or doubling down on their already underwhelming VR/AR experiences
- AI has no demand, they overhired, Wang has no clue what to do next and fires people to make an impact.
Other AI companies will soon follow.
- Meta will shortly post for 700 new AI roles
by Rebuff5007
19 subcomments
- From a quick online search:
- OpenAI's mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
- Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- Meta's mission is to build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.
Lets just take these three companies, and their self-defined mission statements. I see what google and openai are after. Is there any case for anyone to make inside or outside Meta that AI is needed to build the future of human connection? What problem is Meta trying to solve with their billions of investment in "super" intelligence? I genuinely have no idea, and they probably don't either. Which is why they would be laying of 600 people a week after paying a billion dollars to some guy for working on the same stuff.
EDIT: everyone commenting that mission statements are PR fluff. Fine. What is a productive way they can use LLMs in any of their flagship products today?
- I thought the are on a hiring spree for AI roles. Axing jobs in that exact org doesn’t send a good message, not just within the company but also to the larger AI ecosystem and markets.
- Is the bubble still growing, or are we getting close to hitting critical mass?
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- So Meta knows it can't win the AI race, but it's going to keep betting on the AGI race because YOLO/FOMO?
The only thing worse than a bubble? Two bubbles.
by churchill
2 subcomments
- Targeting their legacy Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, not the newly formed Meta Superintelligence lab.
- How many folks in Meta AI division? (Is it 600? 650? Is it 600? 1200? 12000?)
- What happened to the guy that got a $250m deal to join Meta for his multimodal models?
by nothrowaways
0 subcomment
- Meta have no idea what they are doing. They try too hard to be cool kids.
- Seems like the AI push is going about as well as the metaverse push.
by robotsquidward
1 subcomments
- I love the sound of employees being more 'load bearing'. Meta seems like a fun place to work for (for however many months you last).
- They could have predicted this ... with some probability?
by sidewndr46
1 subcomments
- Meta stock is trading down today at the moment, slightly more than the S&P 500.
Maybe they should have just announced the layoffs without specifying the division?
- I am not a business expert, but my perception as a developer that loved Llama 1-3, is that it appears that this org is flailing.
- Converting workers to stock buybacks.
- I totally get it Yann LeCun and FAIR want to focus on next gen research, but they seem almost proud of their distance from product development at Meta. Isn't that a convenient way to avoid accountability? Meta has published a ton of great work, but appears to be losing economically in AI. It's understandable that the executive team wants change.
- You can think of Metabook like a chemical spill
If you're not swimming in their river, or you weren't responsible for their spill, who cares?
But it spreads into other rivers and suddenly you have a mess
In this analogy the chemical spill - for those who don't have Meta accounts, or sorry, guess you do, we've made one for you, so sorry - is valuation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211388
by Simon_O_Rourke
0 subcomment
- That'll save them a few million dollars when things are tight.
by captainregex
0 subcomment
- I can't with them anymore. Pick a lane
by yupyipeetttt
0 subcomment
- OODA loop for organizations would help here
by throwawaykf10
0 subcomment
- This is in addition to another round of cuts from a couple months ago that didn't make the news. I heard from somebody who joined Meta in an AI-related division at a senior position a few months ago. Said within a couple of months of joining, almost his entire department was gutted -- VPs, directors, manager, engineers -- and he was one of the very few left.
Not sure of the exact numbers, given it was within a single department, the cuts were not big but definitely went swift and deep.
As an outside observer, Zuck has always been a sociopath, but he was also always very calculated. However over the past few months he seems to be getting much more erratic and, well... "Elon-y" with this GenAI thing. I wonder what he's seeing that is causing this behavior.
(Crossposted from dupe at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719)
- I find it ironic given recruiters from that division have been messaging me every 4 months like a clock during the last 2 years, last one just a month ago from Llama team. Fortunately, they did not have an option to work in Singapore (where I want to be) or Montreal (where I am). Otherwise after Llama 3.x success the org seemed appealing until 4's release.
My wife left Meta Reality Labs in summer 2024 precisely because it seemed dysfunctional. I can see how the Llama division could have ended up in a similar state if it adopted similar management practices.
- I get it though. Big tech's HR sucks big time. You need super intelligent people for this kind of work. You can't have incompetent people with PhDs holding back the real brains.
I don't know how it's possible that companies like Meta could get away with having non-technical people as HR. They need all their HR people to be top software engineers.
You need coding geniuses just to be doing the hiring... And I don't mean people who can solve leetcode puzzles quickly. You need people with a proven track record solving real, difficult problems. Fully completed projects. And that's just to qualify for the HR team IMO... Not worthy enough to be contributing code to such important project. If you don't treat the project as if it is highly important, it won't be.
Normal HR people just fill the company with political nonsense.
by spacecadet
0 subcomment
- How long before it finally clicks that facebook/Meta was never more than white privilege, timing, luck, and dumb money? That the concepts were not new and Zuck isn't that innovative or visionary? This goes for all the "Tech Luminaries" and Musk Rats...
by yodsanklai
0 subcomment
- Wonder if Yann Le Cun is one of them
- This says more about Meta than about where AI is heading. For me personally my work, my life has transformed dramatically, literally, since 2022, since OpenAI launched ChatGPT and what followed then. I feel like having a dozen assistants who help me levarage my skills exponentially, do tedious work, do things I never had the time and resources to do. I see it in my salary, in the results I produce, in the projects I can accept and do.
My life after LLMs is not the same anymore. Literally.
- Everyone here ragging on Wang but I can never figure out how some people grow the balls to work themselves into such high positions. Like, if I met with Zuck, I think he’d be unimpressed and bored within 2 minutes. Yet this guy (and others like him) can convince Zuck to give him a few billion dollars.
There is a language these people speak, and some physical primate posturing they do, which my brain just can’t emulate.
by lawlessone
0 subcomment
- I'd imagine that's maddening to have your role change every few months.
- It's only 600 so far... Rumors were that it was going to be in the thousands. We'll see how long they can hold off. Alexandr really wants to get rid of many more people.
- Can we stop pulling tears for people who have million dollar salaries getting cut. But muh lifestyle creep... lol.
by sexeriy237
0 subcomment
- pop
by nextworddev
3 subcomments
- assuming 500K avg comp, that's ~300m/yr.
- makes sense. AI to cast out AI
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719
- Meta probably reached AGI and now the AI is advanced enough to develop better models of itself. So now AI is even replacing the AI developers.
/s
- Bubble go pop
by AndrewKemendo
1 subcomments
- This is actually really interesting because I’ve never actually seen anything coming out of Lecun‘s group that made it into production
that does not mean that nothing did, but this indicates to me that FAIR work never actually made it out of the lab and basically everything that Lecun has been working on has been shelved
That makes sense to me as he and most of the AI divas have focused on their “Governor of AI” roles instead of innovating in production
I’ll be interested to see how this shakes out for who is leading AI at Meta going forward
- they've lost on basically all fronts of AI right?
by cadamsdotcom
0 subcomment
- They hired fast to build some of these departments, you can bet not all of those hires were A+.
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