Meta recently laid off 8,000 employees to push for a broader AI-focused restructuring. Meanwhile, the company has reassigned around 7,000 workers to new AI teams as CEO Mark Zuckerberg seeks to strengthen Meta’s position in the AI sector. According to an internal memo reviewed by Business Insider (BI), thousands of employees were informed they had been selected to join a newly formed Applied AI (AAI) group or other AI-focused teams. The initiative is part of a wider reorganisation that places AI development at the centre of Meta’s strategy.One of the emails seen by BI read, “This is a reflection of your impact.” This message told recipients that they were picked for their “strong performance” and technical abilities. “You were identified as someone who can make a real impact on this team,” the email read.The newly assigned employees will work within AI-focused groups, including Applied AI, led by engineering vice president Maher Saba and reporting to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. Other teams include the “Agent Transformation Accelerator and Agent Data and Optimization” groups, which are focused on AI agents and model development.
How Meta employees are being reassigned as company expands AI efforts
The internal reshuffle comes as Meta continues a series of AI-related changes across the company. The social media giant has already established a superintelligence lab, reorganised teams into smaller AI-focused units and modified some employee job titles to “AI builder.”Among employees, reactions to the reassignment have ranged from relief to uncertainty. Several workers discussed the move on internal forums and workplace apps, with some describing the process as an “AI draft.”“I got drafted,” one employee wrote on a Discord server used by Meta workers, the report noted.“Welcome to the draft,” another responded.According to employees who spoke to BI, participation in the initiative appears mandatory. Some workers also expressed uncertainty about the nature of their new responsibilities.Some employees believe the new AI task forces will focus on data labelling and model training, including tasks such as tagging images and correcting chatbot responses.The initiative aligns with the expertise of Meta’s AI chief, Alexandr Wang, who previously led data-labelling company Scale AI before joining Meta.Meta has also introduced other internal AI projects. Earlier this year, the company launched the Model Capability Initiative, a tool designed to track employee interactions with computers to help train AI systems using real-world examples of human workflows.An internal post announcing the software said: “For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples.”In a leaked recording of an internal meeting, Zuckerberg highlighted Wang’s experience in data labelling and suggested that Meta could gain an advantage by using its own workforce to train AI systems.“I think that this is going to be a very big advantage if we can do it,” Zuckerberg said, while noting that the idea remained a “hypothesis” at the time.
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