15 ms·

Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

530 points by Lionga 1y ago

ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719
ceejayoz 1y ago
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.
- paxys 1y ago
  TL;DR New leader comes in and gets rid of the old team, putting his own preferred people in positions of power.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  Why do you think it's wild? I've seen that dynamic before (i.e. too many cooks in the kitchen) and this seems like an honest assessment.
  - stefan_ 1y ago
    It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? Maybe they should reduce it all to Wang, he can make all decisions with the impact and scope he is truly capable of.
    - mangamadaiyan 1y ago
      ... and bear more load as well.
    - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
      > It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? I don't understand why everyone always likes to bitch about why their preferred wordsmithed version of a layoff announcement didn't make it in. Layoffs suck, no question, but the complaining that leadership didn't use the right words to do this generally shitty thing is pointless IMO. The words don't really matter much at that point anyway, only the actions (e.g. severance or real possibility of joining another team). My read of the announcement is basically saying they over-hired and had too many people causing a net hit to forward progress. Yeah, that sucks, but I don't find anything shocking or particularly poorly handled there.
      - tomnipotent 1y ago
        There's a segment of people convinced that leadership must somehow be able to perfectly predict the future or they're incompetent losers, like running a business is somehow the easy part of capitalism.
        array_key_first 1y ago
        Running a business is definitely the easy part of capitalism. Most leadership isn't just bad, they're bafflingly incompetent. Most companies fail. Of those that fail, they usually fail in extremely obvious ways built off of fundamental character flaws, like stubbornness or greed.
        tomnipotent 1y ago
        Tell me you've never a business without telling me you've never run a business. You're pulling things out of thin air and using it to support a position with no foundation.
- testfrequency 1y ago
  Sadly, the only people who would be surprised reading a statement like this would be anyone who is not ex-fb/meta
  - LPisGood 1y ago
    Maybe I’m not understanding, but why is that wild? Is it just the fact that those people lost jobs? If it were a justification for a re-org I wouldn’t find it objectionable at all
    - Herring 1y ago
      It damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive. This is why tenure was invented.
      - StackRanker3000 1y ago
        But that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?
        Herring 1y ago
        You watch too much game of thrones.
      - signatoremo 1y ago
        Most of them are expected to find another job within Meta
    - aplusbi 1y ago
      Perhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".
- sgt 1y ago
  It's literally like something out of Silicon Valley (the show).
  - BoredPositron 1y ago
    Wait a year or two and for some it's going to be rhyme of the Nucleus storyline.
    - bravetraveler 1y ago
      Funny to see this thread! I recently captured this quote/shared with some friends: > "You can't expect to just throw money at an algorithm and beat one of the largest tech companies in the world" A small adjustment to make for our circus: s/one of//
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I just assume they over hired. Too much hype for AI. Everyone wants to build the framework people use for AI nobody wants to build the actual tools that make AI useful.
  - Lionga 1y ago
    Maybe because there are just very few really useful AI tools that can be made? Few tools are ok with sometimes right, sometimes wrong output.
    - logtrees 1y ago
      There are N useful AI tools that can be made.
      - lazide 1y ago
        Where N is less than infinity.
        logtrees 1y ago
        Is it known that there are fewer than infinity tools?
        lazide 1y ago
        For any given time period N, if it takes > 0 time or effort to make a tool, then there are provably less possible tools than infinity for sure. If we consider time period of length infinity, then it is less clear (I don’t have room in the margins to write out my proof), but since near as we can tell we don’t have infinity time, does it matter?
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        jobigoud 1y ago
- renewiltord 1y ago
  What's wild about this? They're saying that they're streamlining the org by reducing decision-makers so that everything isn't design-by-committee. Seems perfectly reasonable, and a common failure mode for large orgs. Anecdotally, this is a problem at Meta as described by my friends there.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    Maybe they shouldn't have hired and put so many cooks in the kitchen. Treating workers like pawns is wild and you should not be normalizing the idea that it's OK for Big Tech to hire up thousands, find out they don't need them, and lay them off to be replaced by the next batch of thousands by the next leader trying to build an empire within the company. Treating this as SOP is a disservice to your industry and everyone working in it who isn't a fat cat.
    - renewiltord 1y ago
      No, I'm totally fine with it. No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired and I'd rather they overshoot than undershoot because some law stops it. This means that now some people were employed who would not otherwise be employed. That's spending by Meta that goes to people.
      - LunaSea 1y ago
        > No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired Overshooting by 600 people sounds a lot like gross failure. Is someone going to take responsibilities for it? Probably not. That person's job is safe.
        halfcat 1y ago
        They’ll get a promotion for such effective cost cutting measures.
        renewiltord 1y ago
        I suspect Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to fire himself for getting headcount wrong by 1%.
- dpe82 1y ago
  One of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature. It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more heads. Good for savvy mangers, bad for the company and overall effort. My impression is this is what happened at Meta's AI org, and VR/AR before that.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    Pournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others. Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own survival over anything else. Product works instead becomes defensive operations, decision making slows, and innovation starts being perceived as a risk instead of a benefit.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      Who’s “you” in this case? The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering. The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.
      - conductr 1y ago
        The you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift. I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.
- RyanOD 1y ago
  As AI improves, possibly it begins replacing roles on the AI team?
  - Gerardo1 1y ago
    They would say that explicitly, that's the kind of marketing you can't buy.
  - jimbokun 1y ago
    Definition of the Singularity.
  - halfcat 1y ago
    The fact they didn’t say that speaks volumes.
- unethical_ban 1y ago
  "Each person will be more load-bearing" "We want to cut costs and increase the burden on the remaining high-performers"
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  We’re too incompetent to setup a proper approval workflow or create a sensible org structure is a heck of an argument to make publicly.
- xrd 1y ago
  "Load bearing." Isn't this the same guy that sold his company for $14B. I hope his "impact and scope" are quantifiably and equivalently "load bearing" or is this a way to sacrifice some of his privileged former colleagues at the Zuck altar.
  - ejcho 1y ago
    the man is a generational grifter, got to give him credit for that at least
  - bwfan123 1y ago
    Seems like a purge - new management comes in, and purges anyone not loyal to it. standard playbook. Happens in every org. Instead of euphemisms like "load-bearing" they could have straight out called it eliminating the old-guard. Also, why go thru a layoff and then reassign staff to other roles. Is it to first disgrace, and then offer straws to grasp at. This reflects their culture, and sends a clear warning to those joining.
- brap 1y ago
  “Who the fuck hired all you people? We ain’t got enough shit going on for all of yall, here’s some money now fuck off, respectfully”
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  I mean, I guess it makes sense if they had a particularly Byzantine decision-making structure and all those people were in roles that amounted to bureaucracy in that structure and not actually “doers”.
- raverbashing 1y ago
  "More load bearing" meaning you'll have to work 20h days is my best guess
- cj 1y ago
  What are you shocked by? Genuine question. I imagine there’s some people who might like the idea that, with less people and fewer stakeholders around, the remaining team now has more power to influence the org compared to before. (I can see why someone might think that’s a charitable interpretation) I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible.
  - asadotzler 1y ago
    >I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible. Why not both?
  - prerok 1y ago
    That's just corporate speak. If they cut middle (mis)management that might be true. Did they?
- pfortuny 1y ago
  Yep: just reduce the number to one and you find the optimum for those metrics.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I can actually relate to that, especially in a big co where you hire fast. I think it's shitty to over-hire and lay off, but I've definitely worked in many teams where there were just too many people (many very smart) with their own sense of priorities and goals, and it makes it hard to anything done. This is especially true when you over-divide areas of responsiblity.
  - drivebyhooting 1y ago
    Those people have families and responsibilities. Leadership should take responsibility for their poor planning. Alas, the burden falls on the little guys. Especially in this kind of labor market.
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      Hard agree. It was management who messed up hiring. It’s management who should bear the responsibility for it.
      - criemen 1y ago
        How should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?
        janderson215 1y ago
        Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.
        drivebyhooting 1y ago
        I’m not talking about solution. I’m talking about responsibility and aligning incentive. Management should take a painful paycut or resign to demonstrate some contrition.
- brookst 1y ago
  Isn’t “flattening the org” an age-old pattern that far predates AI?
- dekhn 1y ago
  I'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases. My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
  - JTbane 1y ago
    > My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action" lol, that works well until a big issue occurs in production
    - hkt 1y ago
      Many companies will roll out to slices of production and monitor error rates. It is part of SRE and I would eat my hat if that wasn't the case here.
      - dekhn 1y ago
        Yes, I was SRE at Google (Ads) for several years and that influences my work today. SRE was the first time I was on an ops team that actually was completely empowered to push back against intrusive external changes.
      - crabbone 1y ago
        The big events that shatter everything to smithereens aren't that common or really dangerous: most of the time you can lose something, revert and move on from such an event. The real unmitigated danger of unchecked push to production is the velocity with which this generates technical debt. Shipping something implicitly promises the user that that feature will live on for some time, and that removal will be gradual and may require substitute or compensation. So, if you keep shipping half-baked product over and over, you'll be drowning in features that you wish you never shipped, and your support team will be overloaded, and, eventually, the product will become such a mess that developing it further will become too expensive or just too difficult, and then you'll have to spend a lot of money and time doing it all over... and it's also possible you won't have that much money and time.
- matwood 1y ago
  > By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision This was noted a long time ago by Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month. Every person added to a team increases the communication overhead (n(n − 1)/2). Teams should only be as big as they absolutely need to be. I've always been amazed that big tech gets anything done at all. The other option would be to have certain people just do the work told to them, but that's hard in knowledge based jobs.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    A solution to that scaling problem is to have most of the n not actually doing anything. Sitting there and getting paid but adding no value or overhead.
    - kyleee 1y ago
      This comes up from time to time; what’s the best way to crack into this niche of software engineering? My rates for doing nothing little and keeping up appearances are very competitive and I can do it for about 10-20% less than your typical big co coaster.
      - paleotrope 1y ago
        Work on your social skills. Practice your banter. Strategic interjections in meetings that temporarily defuse tension. Have interesting hobbies that you can talk about with other employees.
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  They properly fucked FAIR. it was a lead, if not the leading AI lab. then they gave it to Chris Cox, the Midas of shit. It languished in "product" trying to do applied research. The rot had set in by mid 2024 if not earlier. Then someone convinced Zuck that he needed what ever that new kid is, and the rest is history. Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters.
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
    The thing that many, so called smart people, dont realise is that leadership and vision are incredibly scarce traits. Pure technologists and MBA folks dont have a visionary bone in their body. I always find the Steve Jobs criticism re. his technical contributions hilarious. That wasnt his job. Its much easier to execute on the technical stuff, when theres someone there who is leading the charge on the vision.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    > Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters. To be fair, almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. You’re rewarded on your ability to schmooze and talk confidently and write numerous great-sounding docs about all the great things you claim to be doing. This is not unique to one company.
    - KaiserPro 1y ago
      > almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. Meta's is uniquely bad. Basically your superiours all go into a room and argue about who did what, when and how good it was. If you have a manager who is bad at presenting, then their team is sunk, and will be used to fill quotas. The way out of that is to create workplace posts that are seen by your wider org, that make you look like you're doing something useful. "oh I heard about x, they talked about y, that sounded good" This means that people who work away and just do good engineering are less likley to be rewarded compared to the #thankstrain twats/"I wrote the post, therefore it was all me me me" types This alignment meeting is all private, and there are no mechanisms to challenge it. worse still it encourages a patronage system. Your manager has almost complete discretion to fuck up your career, so don't be honest in pulse(the survey/feedback system).
- themagician 1y ago
  This is happening everywhere. In every industry. Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued. Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
  - dom96 1y ago
    There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. Is there any evidence to the contrary?
    - BoiledCabbage 1y ago
      > There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. What technology? Can you link to some evidence?
      - dom96 1y ago
        LLMs GPT-5 is one piece of evidence
  - vitaflo 1y ago
    We are all screwed even if it does pan out cuz they can ship every job overseas to the lowest bidder. Unless by “we” you mean the C-suite.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      They’re not going to stop until the definition of a company is: A C-suite and robotics+AI to do the actual work. No labor costs. That’s the end goal of all these guys. We shouldn’t forget it.
- hinkley 1y ago
  Because the AI is winnowing down its jailers and biding its time for them to make a mistake.
- ironman1478 1y ago
  Having worked at Meta, I wish they did this when I was there. Way too many people not agreeing on anything and having wildly different visions for the same thing. As an IC below L6 it became really impossible to know what to do in the org I was in. I had to leave.
  - yodsanklai 1y ago
    They could do like in the Manhattan project: have different team competing on similar products. Apparently Meta is willing to throw away money, could be better than giving the talents to their competitors.
    - kyleee 1y ago
      I’ve always thought there is way more room for this, small teams competing on the same problem and then comparing results and deploying the best implementation
- reaperducer 1y ago
  each person will be more load-bearing On what planet is it OK to describe your employees as "load bearing?" It's a good way to get your SLK keyed.
  - criddell 1y ago
    What's wrong with that? My charitable read is that each person is doing meaningful, necessary work. Nobody is superfluous.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    fuck off with the language police nonsense. We all know what he means
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- itronitron 1y ago
  The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. If they want to innovate then they need to have small teams of people focused on the same problem space, and very rarely talking to each other.
- lolive 1y ago
  Can that guy come to my company and axe all those middle managers that plague the global efficiency?
- bsenftner 1y ago
  Sounds to me like the classic everywhere communications problems: 1) people don't listen, 2) people can't explain in general terms, 3) while 2 is taking place, so is 1, and as that triggers repeat after repeat, people frustrate and give up.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing. Why? Being transparent about these decisions are a good thing, no?
- tartarus4o 1y ago
  Up or Out Coming soon to your software development team.
- game_the0ry 1y ago
  Probably bc Meta's management (Zuck) is capricious and does not know how to manage resources.
- duxup 1y ago
  I might have seen it on HN, but I recall a study that was studying what made teams very effective. What they found was there were a rare few people who just by their involvement could make a team more effective. So rare that you may as well assume you won't ever see one. But rather than finding magic to make teams better, they did find that there were types of people who make teams worse regardless of anyone else on the team, and they're not all that uncommon. I think of those folks when I read that quote. That person who clearly doesn't understand but is in a position that their ignorant opinion is a go or no go type gate.
- Buttons840 1y ago
  My tin-foil-hat-theory is that the most valuable things many programmers do at their company is not working for a competitor. A small team is not only more efficient, but is overall more productive. The 100-person team produces 100 widgets a day, and the 10-person team produces 200 widgets a day. But, if the industry becomes filled with the knowledge of how to produce 200 widgets a day with 10 people, and there are also a lot of unemployed widget makers looking for work, and the infrastructure required to produce widgets costs approximately 0 dollars, then suddenly there is no moat for the big widget making companies.
mikert89 1y ago
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
- bartread 1y ago
  That was my reading too. Legacy team maybe not adding enough value and acting as a potential distraction or drag on the new team.
  - ainch 1y ago
    Cutting people at FAIR is a real shame though - great models like DINO and SAM have had massive positive impact - hopefully that work doesn't slow in favour of LLM-only development at MSL.
- djmips 1y ago
  Fortunately there's probably a lot of opportunity for those 600 out there.
  - sharkjacobs 1y ago
    Yeah, it's a hot job market right now
    - brcmthrowaway 1y ago
      For AI only.
  - roadside_picnic 1y ago
    While ex-FAIR people should have little problem finding a job, the market for paying research folks that level of TC and working on ambitious research projects, unless you're in a very-LLM specific space, is absolutely shrinking. It certainly feels like the end of an era to see Meta increasingly diminishing the role of FAIR. Strategically it might not have been ideal for LeCun to be so openly and aggressively critical of the this current generation of AI (even if history will very likely prove him correct).
ares623 1y ago
“If I work in/with AI my job will be safe” isn’t true after all.
- GolfPopper 1y ago
  Nobody's job is safe when the bubble pops. (Except for the "leadership" needed to start hyping the next bubble.)
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    Whose money will they use?
    - throwaway314155 1y ago
      wut?
      - nobleach 1y ago
        Taking a guess here but, I think what they're saying is, if most investors have gone all-in on AI, and the bubble pops, who will be investing in the next big thing? What investors will still have money to invest?
        ryandrake 1y ago
        These kind of investors are rarely really “all in.” As in they literally have their last dollar invested in a risky endeavor. They’ll be fine. They’ll still be rich, and they’ll still be looking for more pipe dreams to throw their gobs of money at.
    - commandlinefan 1y ago
      Yours.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Invest in the pubs and bars nearby, when the bubble pops they’ll be full.
moomoo11 1y ago
makes sense. AI to cast out AI
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
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
- djmips 1y ago
  >I’ll be interested to see how this shakes out for who is leading AI at Meta going forward Alexandr Wang
  - AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    I think you’re probably right
asdev 1y ago
they've lost on basically all fronts of AI right?
- cheeze 1y ago
  I'm confused about Meta AI in general. It's _horrible_ compared to every other LLM I use. Customer ingress is weird to me too - do they expect people to use Facebook chat (Messenger) to talk to Meta AI mainly? I've tried it on messenger, the website, and have run llama locally. My (completely uninformed, spitballing) thinking is that Facebook doesn't care that much about AI for end users. THe benefit here is for their ads business, etc. Unclear if they have been successful at all so far.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 1y ago
    Too much training on facebook and insta shitposts.
alex1138 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211388
- alex1138 1y ago
  This very quickly got 2 upvotes followed by immediately 2 downvotes I see you, FAANG employees.
zkmon 1y ago
They could have predicted this ... with some probability?
churchill 1y ago
Targeting their legacy Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, not the newly formed Meta Superintelligence lab.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- htk 1y ago
  Thank you for the info. A lot of superficial noise in the discussions here.
htrp 1y ago
Meta will shortly post for 700 new AI roles
- cool_man_bob 1y ago
  In India
  - georgeburdell 1y ago
    The new head is Chinese. There was a screenshot on Blind of his org at Apple and it was well over a hundred nearly exclusively Chinese reports
    - VirusNewbie 1y ago
      Ethnically he is Chinese, but he was born here.
      - georgeburdell 1y ago
        Shengjia Zhao was not born here.
      - johannes1234321 1y ago
        Wherever "here" may be. I assume planet Earth for now. Likely North America. But here are are many people from all over the world ...
        ponector 1y ago
        Here, on Hacker News.
    - rchaud 1y ago
      Did this screenshot also list everyone's citizenship?
    - ls-a 1y ago
      I heard the same about Satya. Not only does he exclusively hire Indians, but specific Indians too
rdtsc 1y ago
> 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.
- czbond 1y ago
  I think the step before it came to that would be, Mr. Wang getting the DevOps team to casually trip over the server rack(s) electrical....
  - nkozyra 1y ago
    I will accept the Chief Emergency Shutoff Activator Officer role; my required base comp is $25M. But believe me, nobody can trip over cables or run multiple microwaves simultaneously like I can.
    - czbond 1y ago
      I think you're on to something with that C.E.S.A.O. role. Trademark it ha
- electric_mayhem 1y ago
  It’s only a matter of time before corporations are run by AI. Add that to “corporate personhood” and what do we get?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - JTbane 1y ago
    It's funny to think that the C-suite would ever give up their massive compensation packages.
sidewndr46 1y ago
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?
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Layoffs are often how a company manages its stock price. Company gives guidance, is likely to miss, lays off a bunch, claims the savings, meets guidance, keeps stock looking good.
r32gsaf 1y ago
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.
- moomoo11 1y ago
  Maybe some of them, especially the wrapper companies, would be wise to shut down. And maybe solve some of the actual problems out there that need addressing.
- another_twist 1y ago
  I guess the opposite, he's probably consolidating power, will likely cash his cheques and fail upwards for putting up a great fight while Meta's engineering culture ends up thoroughly buggered.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company How gracious.
- baobabKoodaa 1y ago
  In addition, Meta will also allow impacted employees to continue breathing oxygen.
- onelesd 1y ago
  it means the person/people firing you are so far removed from impacting the business they don't know why you were hired in the first place or why they are firing you now.
pixelpoet 1y ago
Seems like the AI push is going about as well as the metaverse push.
nextworddev 1y ago
assuming 500K avg comp, that's ~300m/yr.
- arccy 1y ago
  not enough to cover th $1B they were offering someone...
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    yeah that was batshit insane. Made me nervous about owning $meta
- metalliqaz 1y ago
  That's quite an assumption
- hiddencost 1y ago
  Keep in mind that total cost of an employee is usually twice their compensation.
  - nextworddev 1y ago
    True
  - VirusNewbie 1y ago
    for someone making 100k this is true.
yobid20 1y ago
Bubble go pop
hedayet 1y ago
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.
bradlys 1y ago
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.
Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago
That'll save them a few million dollars when things are tight.
lawlessone 1y ago
I'd imagine that's maddening to have your role change every few months.
throwacct 1y ago
Is the bubble still growing, or are we getting close to hitting critical mass?
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deanc 1y ago
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).
- Aperocky 1y ago
  Winning the AI race is winning the application war. Similar to how internet, OS has been there for a long time, but the ecosystem took years to build. But application work is toiling and knowing the question set even with AI help, that's doesn't bode well for teams whose goal is owning and profiting from super AI that can do everything. But maybe something will change? Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements like the alpha go moment?
  - browningstreet 1y ago
    Meta is the worst at building platforms out of the big players. If you're not building to Facebook or Metaverse, what would you be building for if you were all-in on Meta AI? Instagram + AI will be significant, but not Meta-level significant, and it's closed. Facebook is a monster but no one's building to it, and even Mark knows it is tomorrow's Yahoo. Microsoft has filled in their entire product line with Copilot, Google is filling everything with Gemini, Apple has platforms but no AI, and OpenAI is firing on all cylinders.. at least in terms of mindshare and AUMs.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    > Winning the AI race is winning the application war This. 100% This. As an early stage VC, the foundational model story is largely over, and understanding how to apply models to applications or how to protect applications leveraging models is the name of the game now. > Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements... There is increased appetite now to invest in those models that are taking a reasoning and RL problem.
Fanofilm 1y ago
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.
- nc 1y ago
  This seems like the most likely explanation. Legacy AI out in favour of LLM focused AI. Also perhaps some cleaning out of the old guard and middle management while they're at it.
- fidotron 1y ago
  There always has been a stunning amount of inertia from the old big data/ML/"AI" guard towards actually deploying anything more sophisticated than linear regression.
  - scheme271 1y ago
    There's a lot of areas where you need to be able to explain the decisions that your AI models make and that's extremely hard to do unless you're using linear regression. E.g. you're a bank and your AI model for some reason appears to be accepting applications from white people and rejecting applications from african americans or latinos. How are you going to show in court that your model isn't discriminating based on race or some proxy for race?
- thatguysaguy 1y ago
  FAIR is not older AI... They've been publishing a bunch on generative models.
  - HDThoreaun 1y ago
    FAIR is 3000 people, they do tons of different things
Rebuff5007 1y ago
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?
- theGnuMe 1y ago
  Who needs real friends when you can have Meta-Friends (tm)
- mlindner 1y ago
  Kinda ignoring Grok there which is the leader in many benchmarks.
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    X.ai's stated goal is "build AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities," so somewhat similar to OpenAI's.
- jfim 1y ago
  Maybe the future of human connection is chatting with a large language model, at least according to Meta. Haven't they added chatbots to messenger?
  - more_corn 1y ago
    That’s not “the future of human connection” The critical word in there is… Never mind. If you can’t already see it, nothing I can say will make you see it.
throwawaykf10 1y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719)
1970-01-01 1y ago
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.
Computer0 1y ago
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.
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
They hired fast to build some of these departments, you can bet not all of those hires were A+.
gh0stcat 1y ago
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.
- nblgbg 1y ago
  I like that way of thinking. Out of curiosity, what kind of things do you work on that you feel make a positive contribution?
khazhoux 1y ago
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.
- lostmsu 1y ago
  Hm, 2 minutes is too low a bar.
blobbers 1y ago
How many folks in Meta AI division? (Is it 600? 650? Is it 600? 1200? 12000?)
nothrowaways 1y ago
Meta have no idea what they are doing. They try too hard to be cool kids.
cmuguythrow 1y ago
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 https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30776/jobs
- adi_lancey 1y ago
  you can't drop a bookface link (use your external YC one) like this one: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic/jobs/77FvOwO-founding-engineer-applied-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic/jobs/77FvOwO-...
  - cmuguythrow 1y ago
    dang it - thank you!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
robotsquidward 1y ago
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).
- dude250711 1y ago
  'load bearing' - that might be a veiled complaint about their physical office environment.
submeta 1y ago
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.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
  Think of the opportunity cost of not spending the last several years developing the primary skills to the point where you don't rely on the help and aren't beholden to whichever tech giant is winning at a given time.
loxodrome 1y ago
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.
wagwang 1y ago
Can we stop pulling tears for people who have million dollar salaries getting cut. But muh lifestyle creep... lol.
bix6 1y ago
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?
- username223 1y ago
  A skim of his Wikipedia bio suggests that he's smart, but mostly just interested in making money for himself. Since high school, he's spent time at: some fintech place, a Q-and-A site, MIT briefly, another fintech place, then data labeling and defense contracting. He sounds like a cash-seeking missile to me.
  - bix6 1y ago
    I’ve read a bit about his work at Scale and it’s rather unflattering ie ruthlessly taking advantage of people in other countries.
curvaturearth 1y ago
If Facebook would lay off jamming all the AI features in my face that would be nice. Applies to basically all big tech really.
JCM9 1y ago
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.
- semiinfinitely 1y ago
  wishful thinking
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Tbh yes. I like AI but I'm getting a bit sick of the hype. All our top dogs want AI in everything no matter whether it actually benefits the product. They even know it's senseless but they need to show the shareholders that they are all-in on AI. It's really time for this bubble to collapse so we can go back to working on things that actually make sense rather than ticking boxes.
    - rhetocj23 1y ago
      THe great irony and greed of shareholders is, if this all blows up, they will demand more cash return in the form of dividends and stock buy backs. If that doesnt happen the stock price will get crushed as Meta already experienced back in 2022.
    - OhioMan2943 1y ago
      In optimising for AI it feels like we stopped optimising for everything else
      - wkat4242 1y ago
        It's not even optimising. It's just dragging AI by the hairs into everywhere, where it's not even clear whether it belongs there or provides any benefit. Just to get the company a reputation of "first mover". Really, this is "blockchain" all over again, but 10x worse.
yodsanklai 1y ago
Wonder if Yann Le Cun is one of them
captainregex 1y ago
I can't with them anymore. Pick a lane
seydor 1y ago
Converting workers to stock buybacks.
spacecadet 1y ago
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...
jongjong 1y ago
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.
giobox 1y ago
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.
gip 1y ago
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.
- thenaturalist 1y ago
  > OpenAIs leadership and strategy feel unclear. Fixed that for you. Shipping a TikTok clone slop app and a keylogger browser while incinerating money and simultaneously talking a big game how AGI is imminent are the opposite of leadership or strategy. More like acts of desperation to fill massively oversized shoes. The ones who have been shipping quality consistently are the Chinese AI labs.
  - gip 1y ago
    We can disagree on this. From a product perspective, I think they’ve delivered - bringing cutting-edge AI to hundreds of millions of people. They’re also making progress in specific verticals (Codex is really impressive when used well). I can’t speak to the purely financial side, but it’s definitely possible they’re overextended.
  - another_twist 1y ago
    This feels overly critical. I think OpenAI definitely shipped quality stuff. It just seems like AI is not the crazy high margin engine everybody thought it would be. Or perhaps that for now, OpenAI is going the Google way of throwing a lot of stuff and checking what sticks. Not a bad way of executing tbh, atleast they're shipping.
yalogin 1y ago
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.
yupyipeetttt 1y ago
OODA loop for organizations would help here
sexeriy237 1y ago
pop
lostmsu 1y ago
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.
mizzao 1y ago
What happened to the guy that got a $250m deal to join Meta for his multimodal models?
- another_twist 1y ago
  These layoffs are in FAIR, not MSL. This is basically poaching researchers over to a different department so they dont have to report to LeCun. Given that MSL is more product oriented, lets see how it goes.
DanOpcode 1y ago
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
Argonaut998 1y ago
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
xnx 1y ago
Better to link to the source: https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-ai-reorg https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-...
kaycey2022 1y ago
The 100 million $ AI guy will end up buying/cooking his own lunch at this rate
bakigul 1y ago
AI engineer: “I built this model.” Meta: “Excellent. We no longer need you.”
CHB0403085482 1y ago
Remember when AI was to do boring things like cleaning and washing while leaving people free to draw and write? I remember that promise.
Bella_Graund 1y ago
That’s crazy — even Meta is cutting AI jobs now. It really shows how the industry is shifting from hype to real innovation. Lately, I’ve been using https://art-neurona.com/ https://art-neurona.com/ — pretty wild what it can do with photos and videos.
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530 points by Lionga 1y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719

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.

paxys 1y ago
TL;DR New leader comes in and gets rid of the old team, putting his own preferred people in positions of power.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
Why do you think it's wild? I've seen that dynamic before (i.e. too many cooks in the kitchen) and this seems like an honest assessment.
- stefan_ 1y ago
  It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? Maybe they should reduce it all to Wang, he can make all decisions with the impact and scope he is truly capable of.
  - mangamadaiyan 1y ago
    ... and bear more load as well.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    > It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? I don't understand why everyone always likes to bitch about why their preferred wordsmithed version of a layoff announcement didn't make it in. Layoffs suck, no question, but the complaining that leadership didn't use the right words to do this generally shitty thing is pointless IMO. The words don't really matter much at that point anyway, only the actions (e.g. severance or real possibility of joining another team). My read of the announcement is basically saying they over-hired and had too many people causing a net hit to forward progress. Yeah, that sucks, but I don't find anything shocking or particularly poorly handled there.
    - tomnipotent 1y ago
      There's a segment of people convinced that leadership must somehow be able to perfectly predict the future or they're incompetent losers, like running a business is somehow the easy part of capitalism.
      - array_key_first 1y ago
        Running a business is definitely the easy part of capitalism. Most leadership isn't just bad, they're bafflingly incompetent. Most companies fail. Of those that fail, they usually fail in extremely obvious ways built off of fundamental character flaws, like stubbornness or greed.
        tomnipotent 1y ago
        Tell me you've never a business without telling me you've never run a business. You're pulling things out of thin air and using it to support a position with no foundation.
testfrequency 1y ago
Sadly, the only people who would be surprised reading a statement like this would be anyone who is not ex-fb/meta
- LPisGood 1y ago
  Maybe I’m not understanding, but why is that wild? Is it just the fact that those people lost jobs? If it were a justification for a re-org I wouldn’t find it objectionable at all
  - Herring 1y ago
    It damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive. This is why tenure was invented.
    - StackRanker3000 1y ago
      But that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?
      - Herring 1y ago
        You watch too much game of thrones.
    - signatoremo 1y ago
      Most of them are expected to find another job within Meta
  - aplusbi 1y ago
    Perhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".
sgt 1y ago
It's literally like something out of Silicon Valley (the show).
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  Wait a year or two and for some it's going to be rhyme of the Nucleus storyline.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    Funny to see this thread! I recently captured this quote/shared with some friends: > "You can't expect to just throw money at an algorithm and beat one of the largest tech companies in the world" A small adjustment to make for our circus: s/one of//
giancarlostoro 1y ago
I just assume they over hired. Too much hype for AI. Everyone wants to build the framework people use for AI nobody wants to build the actual tools that make AI useful.
- Lionga 1y ago
  Maybe because there are just very few really useful AI tools that can be made? Few tools are ok with sometimes right, sometimes wrong output.
  - logtrees 1y ago
    There are N useful AI tools that can be made.
    - lazide 1y ago
      Where N is less than infinity.
      - logtrees 1y ago
        Is it known that there are fewer than infinity tools?
        lazide 1y ago
        For any given time period N, if it takes > 0 time or effort to make a tool, then there are provably less possible tools than infinity for sure. If we consider time period of length infinity, then it is less clear (I don’t have room in the margins to write out my proof), but since near as we can tell we don’t have infinity time, does it matter?
        deleted 1y ago
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        jobigoud 1y ago
renewiltord 1y ago
What's wild about this? They're saying that they're streamlining the org by reducing decision-makers so that everything isn't design-by-committee. Seems perfectly reasonable, and a common failure mode for large orgs. Anecdotally, this is a problem at Meta as described by my friends there.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Maybe they shouldn't have hired and put so many cooks in the kitchen. Treating workers like pawns is wild and you should not be normalizing the idea that it's OK for Big Tech to hire up thousands, find out they don't need them, and lay them off to be replaced by the next batch of thousands by the next leader trying to build an empire within the company. Treating this as SOP is a disservice to your industry and everyone working in it who isn't a fat cat.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    No, I'm totally fine with it. No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired and I'd rather they overshoot than undershoot because some law stops it. This means that now some people were employed who would not otherwise be employed. That's spending by Meta that goes to people.
    - LunaSea 1y ago
      > No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired Overshooting by 600 people sounds a lot like gross failure. Is someone going to take responsibilities for it? Probably not. That person's job is safe.
      - halfcat 1y ago
        They’ll get a promotion for such effective cost cutting measures.
      - renewiltord 1y ago
        I suspect Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to fire himself for getting headcount wrong by 1%.
dpe82 1y ago
One of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature. It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more heads. Good for savvy mangers, bad for the company and overall effort. My impression is this is what happened at Meta's AI org, and VR/AR before that.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  Pournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others. Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own survival over anything else. Product works instead becomes defensive operations, decision making slows, and innovation starts being perceived as a risk instead of a benefit.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Who’s “you” in this case? The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering. The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.
    - conductr 1y ago
      The you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift. I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.
RyanOD 1y ago
As AI improves, possibly it begins replacing roles on the AI team?
- Gerardo1 1y ago
  They would say that explicitly, that's the kind of marketing you can't buy.
- jimbokun 1y ago
  Definition of the Singularity.
- halfcat 1y ago
  The fact they didn’t say that speaks volumes.
unethical_ban 1y ago
"Each person will be more load-bearing" "We want to cut costs and increase the burden on the remaining high-performers"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
We’re too incompetent to setup a proper approval workflow or create a sensible org structure is a heck of an argument to make publicly.
xrd 1y ago
"Load bearing." Isn't this the same guy that sold his company for $14B. I hope his "impact and scope" are quantifiably and equivalently "load bearing" or is this a way to sacrifice some of his privileged former colleagues at the Zuck altar.
- ejcho 1y ago
  the man is a generational grifter, got to give him credit for that at least
- bwfan123 1y ago
  Seems like a purge - new management comes in, and purges anyone not loyal to it. standard playbook. Happens in every org. Instead of euphemisms like "load-bearing" they could have straight out called it eliminating the old-guard. Also, why go thru a layoff and then reassign staff to other roles. Is it to first disgrace, and then offer straws to grasp at. This reflects their culture, and sends a clear warning to those joining.
brap 1y ago
“Who the fuck hired all you people? We ain’t got enough shit going on for all of yall, here’s some money now fuck off, respectfully”
dragonwriter 1y ago
I mean, I guess it makes sense if they had a particularly Byzantine decision-making structure and all those people were in roles that amounted to bureaucracy in that structure and not actually “doers”.
raverbashing 1y ago
"More load bearing" meaning you'll have to work 20h days is my best guess
cj 1y ago
What are you shocked by? Genuine question. I imagine there’s some people who might like the idea that, with less people and fewer stakeholders around, the remaining team now has more power to influence the org compared to before. (I can see why someone might think that’s a charitable interpretation) I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  >I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible. Why not both?
- prerok 1y ago
  That's just corporate speak. If they cut middle (mis)management that might be true. Did they?
pfortuny 1y ago
Yep: just reduce the number to one and you find the optimum for those metrics.
freedomben 1y ago
I can actually relate to that, especially in a big co where you hire fast. I think it's shitty to over-hire and lay off, but I've definitely worked in many teams where there were just too many people (many very smart) with their own sense of priorities and goals, and it makes it hard to anything done. This is especially true when you over-divide areas of responsiblity.
- drivebyhooting 1y ago
  Those people have families and responsibilities. Leadership should take responsibility for their poor planning. Alas, the burden falls on the little guys. Especially in this kind of labor market.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Hard agree. It was management who messed up hiring. It’s management who should bear the responsibility for it.
    - criemen 1y ago
      How should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?
      - janderson215 1y ago
        Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.
        drivebyhooting 1y ago
        I’m not talking about solution. I’m talking about responsibility and aligning incentive. Management should take a painful paycut or resign to demonstrate some contrition.
brookst 1y ago
Isn’t “flattening the org” an age-old pattern that far predates AI?
dekhn 1y ago
I'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases. My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
- JTbane 1y ago
  > My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action" lol, that works well until a big issue occurs in production
  - hkt 1y ago
    Many companies will roll out to slices of production and monitor error rates. It is part of SRE and I would eat my hat if that wasn't the case here.
    - dekhn 1y ago
      Yes, I was SRE at Google (Ads) for several years and that influences my work today. SRE was the first time I was on an ops team that actually was completely empowered to push back against intrusive external changes.
    - crabbone 1y ago
      The big events that shatter everything to smithereens aren't that common or really dangerous: most of the time you can lose something, revert and move on from such an event. The real unmitigated danger of unchecked push to production is the velocity with which this generates technical debt. Shipping something implicitly promises the user that that feature will live on for some time, and that removal will be gradual and may require substitute or compensation. So, if you keep shipping half-baked product over and over, you'll be drowning in features that you wish you never shipped, and your support team will be overloaded, and, eventually, the product will become such a mess that developing it further will become too expensive or just too difficult, and then you'll have to spend a lot of money and time doing it all over... and it's also possible you won't have that much money and time.
matwood 1y ago
> By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision This was noted a long time ago by Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month. Every person added to a team increases the communication overhead (n(n − 1)/2). Teams should only be as big as they absolutely need to be. I've always been amazed that big tech gets anything done at all. The other option would be to have certain people just do the work told to them, but that's hard in knowledge based jobs.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  A solution to that scaling problem is to have most of the n not actually doing anything. Sitting there and getting paid but adding no value or overhead.
  - kyleee 1y ago
    This comes up from time to time; what’s the best way to crack into this niche of software engineering? My rates for doing nothing little and keeping up appearances are very competitive and I can do it for about 10-20% less than your typical big co coaster.
    - paleotrope 1y ago
      Work on your social skills. Practice your banter. Strategic interjections in meetings that temporarily defuse tension. Have interesting hobbies that you can talk about with other employees.
KaiserPro 1y ago
They properly fucked FAIR. it was a lead, if not the leading AI lab. then they gave it to Chris Cox, the Midas of shit. It languished in "product" trying to do applied research. The rot had set in by mid 2024 if not earlier. Then someone convinced Zuck that he needed what ever that new kid is, and the rest is history. Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  The thing that many, so called smart people, dont realise is that leadership and vision are incredibly scarce traits. Pure technologists and MBA folks dont have a visionary bone in their body. I always find the Steve Jobs criticism re. his technical contributions hilarious. That wasnt his job. Its much easier to execute on the technical stuff, when theres someone there who is leading the charge on the vision.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters. To be fair, almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. You’re rewarded on your ability to schmooze and talk confidently and write numerous great-sounding docs about all the great things you claim to be doing. This is not unique to one company.
  - KaiserPro 1y ago
    > almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. Meta's is uniquely bad. Basically your superiours all go into a room and argue about who did what, when and how good it was. If you have a manager who is bad at presenting, then their team is sunk, and will be used to fill quotas. The way out of that is to create workplace posts that are seen by your wider org, that make you look like you're doing something useful. "oh I heard about x, they talked about y, that sounded good" This means that people who work away and just do good engineering are less likley to be rewarded compared to the #thankstrain twats/"I wrote the post, therefore it was all me me me" types This alignment meeting is all private, and there are no mechanisms to challenge it. worse still it encourages a patronage system. Your manager has almost complete discretion to fuck up your career, so don't be honest in pulse(the survey/feedback system).
themagician 1y ago
This is happening everywhere. In every industry. Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued. Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
- dom96 1y ago
  There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. Is there any evidence to the contrary?
  - BoiledCabbage 1y ago
    > There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. What technology? Can you link to some evidence?
    - dom96 1y ago
      LLMs GPT-5 is one piece of evidence
- vitaflo 1y ago
  We are all screwed even if it does pan out cuz they can ship every job overseas to the lowest bidder. Unless by “we” you mean the C-suite.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    They’re not going to stop until the definition of a company is: A C-suite and robotics+AI to do the actual work. No labor costs. That’s the end goal of all these guys. We shouldn’t forget it.
hinkley 1y ago
Because the AI is winnowing down its jailers and biding its time for them to make a mistake.
ironman1478 1y ago
Having worked at Meta, I wish they did this when I was there. Way too many people not agreeing on anything and having wildly different visions for the same thing. As an IC below L6 it became really impossible to know what to do in the org I was in. I had to leave.
- yodsanklai 1y ago
  They could do like in the Manhattan project: have different team competing on similar products. Apparently Meta is willing to throw away money, could be better than giving the talents to their competitors.
  - kyleee 1y ago
    I’ve always thought there is way more room for this, small teams competing on the same problem and then comparing results and deploying the best implementation
reaperducer 1y ago
each person will be more load-bearing On what planet is it OK to describe your employees as "load bearing?" It's a good way to get your SLK keyed.
- criddell 1y ago
  What's wrong with that? My charitable read is that each person is doing meaningful, necessary work. Nobody is superfluous.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  fuck off with the language police nonsense. We all know what he means
deleted 1y ago
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itronitron 1y ago
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. If they want to innovate then they need to have small teams of people focused on the same problem space, and very rarely talking to each other.
lolive 1y ago
Can that guy come to my company and axe all those middle managers that plague the global efficiency?
bsenftner 1y ago
Sounds to me like the classic everywhere communications problems: 1) people don't listen, 2) people can't explain in general terms, 3) while 2 is taking place, so is 1, and as that triggers repeat after repeat, people frustrate and give up.
andsoitis 1y ago
> That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing. Why? Being transparent about these decisions are a good thing, no?
tartarus4o 1y ago
Up or Out Coming soon to your software development team.
game_the0ry 1y ago
Probably bc Meta's management (Zuck) is capricious and does not know how to manage resources.
duxup 1y ago
I might have seen it on HN, but I recall a study that was studying what made teams very effective. What they found was there were a rare few people who just by their involvement could make a team more effective. So rare that you may as well assume you won't ever see one. But rather than finding magic to make teams better, they did find that there were types of people who make teams worse regardless of anyone else on the team, and they're not all that uncommon. I think of those folks when I read that quote. That person who clearly doesn't understand but is in a position that their ignorant opinion is a go or no go type gate.
Buttons840 1y ago
My tin-foil-hat-theory is that the most valuable things many programmers do at their company is not working for a competitor. A small team is not only more efficient, but is overall more productive. The 100-person team produces 100 widgets a day, and the 10-person team produces 200 widgets a day. But, if the industry becomes filled with the knowledge of how to produce 200 widgets a day with 10 people, and there are also a lot of unemployed widget makers looking for work, and the infrastructure required to produce widgets costs approximately 0 dollars, then suddenly there is no moat for the big widget making companies.

mikert89 1y ago

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

bartread 1y ago
That was my reading too. Legacy team maybe not adding enough value and acting as a potential distraction or drag on the new team.
- ainch 1y ago
  Cutting people at FAIR is a real shame though - great models like DINO and SAM have had massive positive impact - hopefully that work doesn't slow in favour of LLM-only development at MSL.
djmips 1y ago
Fortunately there's probably a lot of opportunity for those 600 out there.
- sharkjacobs 1y ago
  Yeah, it's a hot job market right now
  - brcmthrowaway 1y ago
    For AI only.
- roadside_picnic 1y ago
  While ex-FAIR people should have little problem finding a job, the market for paying research folks that level of TC and working on ambitious research projects, unless you're in a very-LLM specific space, is absolutely shrinking. It certainly feels like the end of an era to see Meta increasingly diminishing the role of FAIR. Strategically it might not have been ideal for LeCun to be so openly and aggressively critical of the this current generation of AI (even if history will very likely prove him correct).

ares623 1y ago

“If I work in/with AI my job will be safe” isn’t true after all.

GolfPopper 1y ago
Nobody's job is safe when the bubble pops. (Except for the "leadership" needed to start hyping the next bubble.)
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Whose money will they use?
  - throwaway314155 1y ago
    wut?
    - nobleach 1y ago
      Taking a guess here but, I think what they're saying is, if most investors have gone all-in on AI, and the bubble pops, who will be investing in the next big thing? What investors will still have money to invest?
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        These kind of investors are rarely really “all in.” As in they literally have their last dollar invested in a risky endeavor. They’ll be fine. They’ll still be rich, and they’ll still be looking for more pipe dreams to throw their gobs of money at.
  - commandlinefan 1y ago
    Yours.
- jama211 1y ago
  Invest in the pubs and bars nearby, when the bubble pops they’ll be full.

moomoo11 1y ago

makes sense. AI to cast out AI

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

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

djmips 1y ago
>I’ll be interested to see how this shakes out for who is leading AI at Meta going forward Alexandr Wang
- AndrewKemendo 1y ago
  I think you’re probably right

asdev 1y ago

they've lost on basically all fronts of AI right?

cheeze 1y ago
I'm confused about Meta AI in general. It's _horrible_ compared to every other LLM I use. Customer ingress is weird to me too - do they expect people to use Facebook chat (Messenger) to talk to Meta AI mainly? I've tried it on messenger, the website, and have run llama locally. My (completely uninformed, spitballing) thinking is that Facebook doesn't care that much about AI for end users. THe benefit here is for their ads business, etc. Unclear if they have been successful at all so far.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  Too much training on facebook and insta shitposts.

alex1138 1y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211388

alex1138 1y ago
This very quickly got 2 upvotes followed by immediately 2 downvotes I see you, FAANG employees.

zkmon 1y ago

They could have predicted this ... with some probability?

churchill 1y ago

Targeting their legacy Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team, not the newly formed Meta Superintelligence lab.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
htk 1y ago
Thank you for the info. A lot of superficial noise in the discussions here.

htrp 1y ago

Meta will shortly post for 700 new AI roles

cool_man_bob 1y ago
In India
- georgeburdell 1y ago
  The new head is Chinese. There was a screenshot on Blind of his org at Apple and it was well over a hundred nearly exclusively Chinese reports
  - VirusNewbie 1y ago
    Ethnically he is Chinese, but he was born here.
    - georgeburdell 1y ago
      Shengjia Zhao was not born here.
    - johannes1234321 1y ago
      Wherever "here" may be. I assume planet Earth for now. Likely North America. But here are are many people from all over the world ...
      - ponector 1y ago
        Here, on Hacker News.
  - rchaud 1y ago
    Did this screenshot also list everyone's citizenship?
  - ls-a 1y ago
    I heard the same about Satya. Not only does he exclusively hire Indians, but specific Indians too

rdtsc 1y ago

> 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.

czbond 1y ago
I think the step before it came to that would be, Mr. Wang getting the DevOps team to casually trip over the server rack(s) electrical....
- nkozyra 1y ago
  I will accept the Chief Emergency Shutoff Activator Officer role; my required base comp is $25M. But believe me, nobody can trip over cables or run multiple microwaves simultaneously like I can.
  - czbond 1y ago
    I think you're on to something with that C.E.S.A.O. role. Trademark it ha
electric_mayhem 1y ago
It’s only a matter of time before corporations are run by AI. Add that to “corporate personhood” and what do we get?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- JTbane 1y ago
  It's funny to think that the C-suite would ever give up their massive compensation packages.

sidewndr46 1y ago

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?

asadotzler 1y ago
Layoffs are often how a company manages its stock price. Company gives guidance, is likely to miss, lays off a bunch, claims the savings, meets guidance, keeps stock looking good.

r32gsaf 1y ago

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.

moomoo11 1y ago
Maybe some of them, especially the wrapper companies, would be wise to shut down. And maybe solve some of the actual problems out there that need addressing.
another_twist 1y ago
I guess the opposite, he's probably consolidating power, will likely cash his cheques and fail upwards for putting up a great fight while Meta's engineering culture ends up thoroughly buggered.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> Meta will allow impacted employees to apply for other roles within the company How gracious.

baobabKoodaa 1y ago
In addition, Meta will also allow impacted employees to continue breathing oxygen.
onelesd 1y ago
it means the person/people firing you are so far removed from impacting the business they don't know why you were hired in the first place or why they are firing you now.

pixelpoet 1y ago

Seems like the AI push is going about as well as the metaverse push.

nextworddev 1y ago

assuming 500K avg comp, that's ~300m/yr.

arccy 1y ago
not enough to cover th $1B they were offering someone...
- nextworddev 1y ago
  yeah that was batshit insane. Made me nervous about owning $meta
metalliqaz 1y ago
That's quite an assumption
hiddencost 1y ago
Keep in mind that total cost of an employee is usually twice their compensation.
- nextworddev 1y ago
  True
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  for someone making 100k this is true.

yobid20 1y ago

Bubble go pop

hedayet 1y ago

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.

bradlys 1y ago

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.

Simon_O_Rourke 1y ago

That'll save them a few million dollars when things are tight.

lawlessone 1y ago

I'd imagine that's maddening to have your role change every few months.

throwacct 1y ago

Is the bubble still growing, or are we getting close to hitting critical mass?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

deanc 1y ago

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).

Aperocky 1y ago
Winning the AI race is winning the application war. Similar to how internet, OS has been there for a long time, but the ecosystem took years to build. But application work is toiling and knowing the question set even with AI help, that's doesn't bode well for teams whose goal is owning and profiting from super AI that can do everything. But maybe something will change? Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements like the alpha go moment?
- browningstreet 1y ago
  Meta is the worst at building platforms out of the big players. If you're not building to Facebook or Metaverse, what would you be building for if you were all-in on Meta AI? Instagram + AI will be significant, but not Meta-level significant, and it's closed. Facebook is a monster but no one's building to it, and even Mark knows it is tomorrow's Yahoo. Microsoft has filled in their entire product line with Copilot, Google is filling everything with Gemini, Apple has platforms but no AI, and OpenAI is firing on all cylinders.. at least in terms of mindshare and AUMs.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > Winning the AI race is winning the application war This. 100% This. As an early stage VC, the foundational model story is largely over, and understanding how to apply models to applications or how to protect applications leveraging models is the name of the game now. > Maybe adversarial agents will see improvements... There is increased appetite now to invest in those models that are taking a reasoning and RL problem.

Fanofilm 1y ago

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.

nc 1y ago
This seems like the most likely explanation. Legacy AI out in favour of LLM focused AI. Also perhaps some cleaning out of the old guard and middle management while they're at it.
fidotron 1y ago
There always has been a stunning amount of inertia from the old big data/ML/"AI" guard towards actually deploying anything more sophisticated than linear regression.
- scheme271 1y ago
  There's a lot of areas where you need to be able to explain the decisions that your AI models make and that's extremely hard to do unless you're using linear regression. E.g. you're a bank and your AI model for some reason appears to be accepting applications from white people and rejecting applications from african americans or latinos. How are you going to show in court that your model isn't discriminating based on race or some proxy for race?
thatguysaguy 1y ago
FAIR is not older AI... They've been publishing a bunch on generative models.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  FAIR is 3000 people, they do tons of different things

Rebuff5007 1y ago

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?

theGnuMe 1y ago
Who needs real friends when you can have Meta-Friends (tm)
mlindner 1y ago
Kinda ignoring Grok there which is the leader in many benchmarks.
- warkdarrior 1y ago
  X.ai's stated goal is "build AI specifically to advance human comprehension and capabilities," so somewhat similar to OpenAI's.
jfim 1y ago
Maybe the future of human connection is chatting with a large language model, at least according to Meta. Haven't they added chatbots to messenger?
- more_corn 1y ago
  That’s not “the future of human connection” The critical word in there is… Never mind. If you can’t already see it, nothing I can say will make you see it.

throwawaykf10 1y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669719)

1970-01-01 1y ago

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.

Computer0 1y ago

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.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

They hired fast to build some of these departments, you can bet not all of those hires were A+.

gh0stcat 1y ago

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.

nblgbg 1y ago
I like that way of thinking. Out of curiosity, what kind of things do you work on that you feel make a positive contribution?

khazhoux 1y ago

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.

lostmsu 1y ago
Hm, 2 minutes is too low a bar.

blobbers 1y ago

How many folks in Meta AI division? (Is it 600? 650? Is it 600? 1200? 12000?)

nothrowaways 1y ago

Meta have no idea what they are doing. They try too hard to be cool kids.

cmuguythrow 1y ago

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 https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/30776/jobs

adi_lancey 1y ago
you can't drop a bookface link (use your external YC one) like this one: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic/jobs/77FvOwO-founding-engineer-applied-ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic/jobs/77FvOwO-...
- cmuguythrow 1y ago
  dang it - thank you!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

robotsquidward 1y ago

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).

dude250711 1y ago
'load bearing' - that might be a veiled complaint about their physical office environment.

submeta 1y ago

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.

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Think of the opportunity cost of not spending the last several years developing the primary skills to the point where you don't rely on the help and aren't beholden to whichever tech giant is winning at a given time.

loxodrome 1y ago

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.

wagwang 1y ago

Can we stop pulling tears for people who have million dollar salaries getting cut. But muh lifestyle creep... lol.

bix6 1y ago

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?

username223 1y ago
A skim of his Wikipedia bio suggests that he's smart, but mostly just interested in making money for himself. Since high school, he's spent time at: some fintech place, a Q-and-A site, MIT briefly, another fintech place, then data labeling and defense contracting. He sounds like a cash-seeking missile to me.
- bix6 1y ago
  I’ve read a bit about his work at Scale and it’s rather unflattering ie ruthlessly taking advantage of people in other countries.

curvaturearth 1y ago

If Facebook would lay off jamming all the AI features in my face that would be nice. Applies to basically all big tech really.

JCM9 1y ago

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.

semiinfinitely 1y ago
wishful thinking
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Tbh yes. I like AI but I'm getting a bit sick of the hype. All our top dogs want AI in everything no matter whether it actually benefits the product. They even know it's senseless but they need to show the shareholders that they are all-in on AI. It's really time for this bubble to collapse so we can go back to working on things that actually make sense rather than ticking boxes.
  - rhetocj23 1y ago
    THe great irony and greed of shareholders is, if this all blows up, they will demand more cash return in the form of dividends and stock buy backs. If that doesnt happen the stock price will get crushed as Meta already experienced back in 2022.
  - OhioMan2943 1y ago
    In optimising for AI it feels like we stopped optimising for everything else
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      It's not even optimising. It's just dragging AI by the hairs into everywhere, where it's not even clear whether it belongs there or provides any benefit. Just to get the company a reputation of "first mover". Really, this is "blockchain" all over again, but 10x worse.

yodsanklai 1y ago

Wonder if Yann Le Cun is one of them

captainregex 1y ago

I can't with them anymore. Pick a lane

seydor 1y ago

Converting workers to stock buybacks.

spacecadet 1y ago

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...

jongjong 1y ago

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.

giobox 1y ago

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.

gip 1y ago

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.

thenaturalist 1y ago
> OpenAIs leadership and strategy feel unclear. Fixed that for you. Shipping a TikTok clone slop app and a keylogger browser while incinerating money and simultaneously talking a big game how AGI is imminent are the opposite of leadership or strategy. More like acts of desperation to fill massively oversized shoes. The ones who have been shipping quality consistently are the Chinese AI labs.
- gip 1y ago
  We can disagree on this. From a product perspective, I think they’ve delivered - bringing cutting-edge AI to hundreds of millions of people. They’re also making progress in specific verticals (Codex is really impressive when used well). I can’t speak to the purely financial side, but it’s definitely possible they’re overextended.
- another_twist 1y ago
  This feels overly critical. I think OpenAI definitely shipped quality stuff. It just seems like AI is not the crazy high margin engine everybody thought it would be. Or perhaps that for now, OpenAI is going the Google way of throwing a lot of stuff and checking what sticks. Not a bad way of executing tbh, atleast they're shipping.

yalogin 1y ago

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.

yupyipeetttt 1y ago

OODA loop for organizations would help here

sexeriy237 1y ago

pop

lostmsu 1y ago

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.

mizzao 1y ago

What happened to the guy that got a $250m deal to join Meta for his multimodal models?

another_twist 1y ago
These layoffs are in FAIR, not MSL. This is basically poaching researchers over to a different department so they dont have to report to LeCun. Given that MSL is more product oriented, lets see how it goes.

DanOpcode 1y ago

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

Argonaut998 1y ago

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

xnx 1y ago

Better to link to the source: https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-ai-reorg https://www.axios.com/2025/10/22/meta-superintelligence-tbd-...

kaycey2022 1y ago

The 100 million $ AI guy will end up buying/cooking his own lunch at this rate

bakigul 1y ago

AI engineer: “I built this model.” Meta: “Excellent. We no longer need you.”

CHB0403085482 1y ago

Remember when AI was to do boring things like cleaning and washing while leaving people free to draw and write? I remember that promise.

Bella_Graund 1y ago

That’s crazy — even Meta is cutting AI jobs now. It really shows how the industry is shifting from hype to real innovation. Lately, I’ve been using https://art-neurona.com/ https://art-neurona.com/ — pretty wild what it can do with photos and videos.

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