Mark Zuckerberg spent a good part of this year poaching employees from rival tech companies including OpenAI, Apple and xAI for his artificial intelligence unit aka Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Now, in October, the company’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang has reportedly told employees that 600 roles from the unit will be cut.

Notably, Meta’s newly formed TBD Lab group, which includes many of the highly-paid recent hires have not been hit, as per a Bloomberg report, which cited an internal memo for the details.

MSL has reportedly onboarded 50 staff, including poached employees from Apple, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and OpenAI for packages up to $100 million. Meta spent billions acquiring top talent from around the industry, including a $14.3 billion investment in data labeling startup Scale AI, which led to Wang joining Meta and leading its AI efforts.

Were there signs of an impending layoffs in the hot AI space?

A source told Bloomberg that Meta is encouraging the fired workers to apply for jobs in other departments. The person said that the company plans to keep hiring for its AI teams moving forward, as per the report.

But these layoffs were seemingly in the making. On August 20, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had frozen hiring for its AI division. And a spokesperson for the company told Reuters that the freeze is part of its “basic organisational planning” and that Meta is “undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises”.

Layoffs an industry wide trend amid AI?

Meta is not along in its recent layoffs. We take a look at the other major companies that have cut AI related roles. There are also some who have announced layoffs citing impact from AI reshaping the industry. Take a look: