According to Axios, Meta cut about 600 positions from its Super Intelligence team on Tuesday, involving FAIR AI research, product related AI, and AI infrastructure departments, but the newly established TBD laboratory will not be affected.
After the sky high price competition for talent, this layoff became a follow-up action for Zuckerberg’s restructuring of the Meta AI research team. Under the contraction of the basic theoretical research team, accompanied by the further expansion of the TBD laboratory. The main engine of this super intelligent strategy may receive further support from Meta.
Abolish about 600 positions, ‘bureaucratization’ may become an incentive
On Wednesday afternoon local time, Tian Yuandong, a Chinese AI star and former director of FAIR research scientists, tweeted that multiple employees, including himself and his team, have been affected by the Meta Super Intelligence team’s layoffs.
As one of the top talents in the AI field, Tian Yuandong’s tweet instantly became a “recruitment site”.
Joshua Penman, founder of South Park Commons, an American venture capital firm, announced online that he is in the process of establishing relevant laboratories.
A former colleague even sent out an invitation directly, saying, ‘I used to be Meta people.’. ”
Tian Yuandong was born in Shanghai and graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a bachelor’s and master’s degree. After completing his master’s degree, he entered the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States for further studies and obtained his doctoral degree in 2013.
His research focuses on reinforcement learning, efficient training and inference of large models, AI interpretability, and other fields. He has been nominated for the Mal Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) and for Outstanding Paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
After graduating with a PhD, Tian Yuandong briefly joined the Google autonomous driving team as a software engineer, and then joined Meta (formerly Facebook), where he worked for a long time in the Meta AI Research (FAIR) department.
During his tenure as Director of Research Scientists at FAIR, he led a team focused on enabling AI to achieve complex reasoning and possess planning capabilities. Tian Yuandong himself has led a series of cutting-edge research projects at Meta, including the memory efficient training method GaLore, the Dualformer model that integrates fast and slow thinking, and the groundbreaking Coconut paradigm. He is one of Meta’s important leaders in the field of AI basic research.
It is worth mentioning that before DeepMind’s AlphaGo, Tian Yuandong’s team had already developed the Go AI “Dark Forest”, reaching the level of top amateur Go players. Afterwards, their team completed the open-source replication project ELF OpenGo based on the AlphaGo Zero algorithm, which enabled them to defeat the world’s top human players using only a single GPU.
In addition to Tian Yuandong, several AI scientists have expressed that they have been affected by the layoffs.
Meta GenAI department researcher @ Xianjun Yang posted: ‘I was fired by Meta today.’. As a research scientist, my paper was just cited by legendary figures @ johnschulman2 and Nicholas Carlini yesterday. ”
AI scholar @ Jiaxun Cui also reposted Tian Yuandong’s tweet, stating, ‘Meta is crazy about squid games!’! Today, many doctoral students’ accounts were suspended (and I was also affected). ”
According to reports, Meta is encouraging laid-off employees to apply for other positions within the company and expects that most employees “will be able to find new positions within the company
The reason for this layoff may be that Meta believes that its long-term investment in artificial intelligence research is becoming too bureaucratic, and hopes to create a more flexible and efficient operating model through this restructuring.
By reducing the team size, the communication required for decision-making will be reduced, and the responsibilities of each member will be clearer, thus having greater room for expression and influence. “Alexander Wang, Meta’s Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, explained the reasons for the layoffs in an internal memo.
Super Intelligence team restructuring to make way for AGI
The departments most affected by this layoff are FAIR AI, which is responsible for basic theoretical research, as well as the AI infrastructure and product teams. In contrast, the newly established TBD laboratory is not affected.
The laboratory has only a few dozen people, but the talent density is extremely high, mostly top experts from Google, OpenAI, and Apple. At present, the TBD laboratory is directly led by Alexandre Wang, with the goal of developing the next generation of large language models and achieving personal super intelligence.
A few months ago, Zuckerberg sparked a sky high competition for talent in Silicon Valley, and most of the experts he recruited entered this department. This small yet sophisticated team is like the technology engine of Zuckerberg’s “Super Intelligence Vision”, and the chips placed on TBD Lab are all bets on Meta’s position in the future AGI competition.
According to sources, Zuckerberg has not stopped competing for top talent in the AI field for this team. Meta recently hired OpenAI research scientist Ananya Kumar and had previously been in contact with Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch.
On one hand, there are massive layoffs in “edge departments” such as AI infrastructure and product teams, while on the other hand, the TBD laboratory, which serves as the Meta technology engine, has not been affected and even continues to recruit with Meta’s support. The intention of team restructuring is already very clear: limited resources need to pave the way for the vision of AGI. Under this goal, AI infrastructure, fundamental theoretical research, and even product teams must make way for TBD laboratories at the top of Meta’s research capabilities.
And the real team restructuring even started earlier than imagined.
The Llama-4 model released by Meta in April this year did not meet expectations, which directly led to Zuckerberg’s doubts about the company’s existing AI research model. Therefore, he personally went off to form an elite Super Intelligence team. This team reports directly to Zuckerberg, and since its establishment, their task has been to surpass a group of competitors such as OpenAI and Google.
The recently released GPT-5 hit an invisible upper limit of intelligence, but today it seems to have strengthened Zuckerberg’s determination even more. Unlike OpenAI’s active layout in consumer products such as AI hardware in recent months, Meta’s team restructuring is undoubtedly a preparation for AGI’s next round of heavy investment. Since the day Zuckerberg poached people with his genius list at exorbitant prices, this layoff has already laid the groundwork.
Meta’s super intelligent arms race may no longer have enough time to focus on open fundamental theoretical research, to the point where Alexander Wang would consider research as strong as Tian Yuandong’s to be unnecessary.
With Tianyuandong, will Lecun still be far away? Various rumors about Lecun are flying around, and I wonder how long the founder of FAIR Research Institute can stay at Meta.
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