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?

No.

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

It would be very meta.

probably huge waste of money due to them hiring very expensive resumes that don't know how to do anything practical.

It was a bit of humour rather than a serious comment.

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

From other reports it appears that "The layoffs will impact Meta’s legacy Fundamental AI Research unit, also known as FAIR, along with its AI product and infrastructure division" (Verge article) not the superintelligence lab where they are still hiring.

Any link to this thread?

Meta? Beta!

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

Slow down competition by hiring every talented AI engineer, starving the job market for as long as Meta can afford to.

But they are firing researchers/engineers now, why would they do that if the goal is to keep engineers from moving away.

Probably to prevent competitors from doing the same? I feel like the answer was in your question

They're only firing the grunts whose work their AI has already replaced. Thinning the herd.

So meta has developed AI that makes AI researchers obsolete? If that were the case why hire managers from Apple, they are just as useless as the grunts. And more importantly they must be actually pretty close to AGI and far ahead of the competition if the researchers are obsolete.

> So meta has developed AI that makes AI researchers obsolete

Makes the dumb ones obsolete.

More important is if they fire any managers that don’t make good strategic decisions…

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.

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

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