Following the 11,000 job cuts at Meta on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg publicly shared a message with the company’s staff that some perceived as a hint that those employed in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) might escape the brunt of the layoffs.
In his blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that “We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas, like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.”
The research group “Probability,” which concentrated on deploying machine learning throughout the infrastructure stack, was cut, according to a Meta research scientist who was laid go.
The research scientist Thomas Ahle tweeted that the team consisted of 50 employees, excluding managers: “19 people performing Bayesian Modeling, 9 people doing Ranking and Recommendations, 5 people doing ML Efficiency, and 17 people doing AI for Chip Design and Compilers. additional managers and similar.
It took senior software developer Emily McMilin nearly seven years at Meta to discover a team as great as Probability, she tweeted in response.
In his message to employees, Zuckerberg did mention that he is presently doing a “thorough assessment” of infrastructure investment. This letter was written just a few weeks after Meta shares crashed during its Q3 earnings call.
He wrote, “We’re focused on getting even more efficient with our capacity as we grow our AI infrastructure.” “Our infrastructure will still be a key competitive edge for Meta, and I think we can do it for less money.”
The team “radically simplifies the adoption of machine learning techniques by developers by deeply integrating machine learning into Facebook’s programming languages, developer tooling, and infrastructure,” according to Meta’s Probability website.
Ahle spoke on life following the Meta layoffs and added, “I hope to stay in the Bay Area a while longer, if someone needs some algorithms,” after spending a year and a half on the Meta team.
