Meta Cuts 600 AI Jobs While Expanding Language Model Development
I just heard some pretty big news today. On October 23, 2025, Meta (you know, Facebook's parent company) is slashing about 600 jobs across their AI division. Yikes. The cuts are hitting several core teams - their Fundamental AI Research unit, product AI folks, and infrastructure teams too. But interestingly, they're keeping their hands off the newer TBD Lab.
Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, sent out a memo explaining why they're doing this. He basically said they want to streamline how decisions get made. Fewer meetings, more individual responsibility. Makes sense, I guess? Despite these Meta AI layoffs, they're trying to help affected employees find other roles within the company. Most will probably land on their feet somewhere else internally.
What's kinda contradictory is that while they're cutting all these AI jobs, Meta's actually expanding their TBD Lab at the same time. This unit is focused on developing their latest large language models (LLMs). You know, the tech behind ChatGPT and stuff. Meta's approach with their Llama model is pretty different from competitors - they've made it semi-open source. This means users can actually access and tweak parts of it, unlike the locked-down systems from OpenAI and Google.
But let's be real. Despite this Meta AI innovation, they're still playing catch-up to OpenAI and Google when it comes to getting regular people to use their AI products. Though they do claim over a billion monthly users, which is nothing to sneeze at!
This Meta workforce reduction is happening while there's all this debate about slowing down the race toward AI superintelligence. Some pretty big names in tech and business have been saying "hey, maybe we should pump the brakes a bit." And Meta's definition of "open source" with their Llama model? It's raising eyebrows among purists who say it doesn't quite match what open source traditionally means.
Meanwhile, there's other tech drama happening - ChatGPT might face super strict EU rules, tech leaders want to pause the AI race, and an Amazon outage showed how dependent Europe is on Big Tech. Oh, and Trump pardoned that Binance founder, while the James Webb telescope found "seeds of life" somewhere out in space. Busy times!
The Meta AI team restructuring seems to be about creating more agile teams and getting more impact per employee. But it's happening against this backdrop of intense scrutiny around AI development and big tech influence. I'm curious to see how this plays out - will streamlining their AI division actually help Meta catch up to the competition? Or is this just another tech company cutting costs? What do you think?
