Meta Plans to Cut 600 Jobs at A.i. Superintelligence Labs

How does this make sense considering that Meta is also paying enormous sums of money to hire AI Leaders away from e.g. Apple?

I wonder if those 600 successfully contributed to automating their own jobs out of existence.

I bet zuck read hn thread of latest (was it first?) paper from that lab and thought "i cannot let that dweebs shittalk me"

It’s wild to me that Alexandr Wang gets to make these decisions, unless I’m mistaken, ScaleAI isn’t exactly a major software company, it outsources “manual” labeling. Does this guy have any experience running large scale software projects?

They have automated themselves out of their roles and achieved "AGI". /s

Reminder that no job is safe. Tech folks lived a fantasy during the 00-20s where they would complain about constant recruiter calls and quitting for any reason whatsoever. It's time to wake up

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.