Meta is laying off roughly 600 employees from its Superintelligence Labs, the umbrella division overseeing its AI research and product development, according to an internal memo obtained by The New York Times.
The move affects teams across Meta's legacy Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) unit, as well as product and infrastructure groups.
The cuts reportedly spare the core unit led by Alexandr Wang, Meta's recently appointed Chief AI Officer. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reaffirmed that building systems that surpass human cognition, or "superintelligence," remains one of the company's highest priorities.
To understand what’s really going on at Meta and what it means for the AI race, I talked it through with SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 176 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
The cuts follow years of rapid, aggressive hiring as Zuckerberg poured billions into AI, recruiting top researchers from rivals, including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.
According to Wang’s memo, the goal is to "reduce layers and speed up decision making" that resulted from building up the AI efforts too quickly.
Roetzer emphasizes that this move should not be mistaken for AI automating the jobs of AI researchers.
"I don't think this is an AI-automated-the-job-of-AI-researchers, so we don't need these 600 people," he said.
Instead, Roetzer believes the restructuring points to a strategic consolidation designed to protect and accelerate breakthroughs.
"They've made it pretty clear they like the idea of really small teams that probably can keep information tight," he said.
As Meta pursues superintelligence, the strategy appears to be shifting toward a more secretive, focused approach, consolidating its top talent rather than spreading it across large, siloed divisions.
"If they feel like they start making breakthroughs, they want to run this thing more like a Manhattan Project where there's just very few people who are in-the-know about things," Roetzer explained.
This isn't about reducing headcount as much as it is about focusing the "smartest people in the world" into smaller, high-impact groups to "best set up these teams to pursue these superintelligence goals."
While this core team focused on building superintelligence is reportedly still hiring, the cuts signal a clear shift away from Meta's older research structures.
Roetzer notes it likely "won't bode well for the people who've been there that were doing things the other way."
Meanwhile, Meta's competitors are likely watching with interest as a new pool of high-end talent hits the market.
"I would imagine OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and others are ecstatic," says Roetzer. "It's like, great, we'll go pick up some talent that's been at a leading AI lab."
Ultimately, Meta’s 600-person layoff isn’t a sign that its AI ambitions are shrinking.
It signals a strategic pivot: moving away from the sprawling, distributed research model of its legacy FAIR lab and consolidating power into a smaller, potentially more secretive, and empowered team dedicated to winning the race to AGI.