The job cuts will affect the company’s teams focused on artificial-intelligence products, infrastructure, and long-term AI research, but won’t touch TBD Lab, the new team that houses most of Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion-dollar hires, the memo said.
“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” wrote Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer.
He said that there are no changes to the broader Meta Superintelligence Labs structure, which was put together over the summer to help Meta revamp its AI efforts, and that the company plans to continue hiring AI-native talent. Meta recently poached Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch, the Journal previously reported.
Most of the affected employees will have the opportunity to be “redeployed” to other jobs at Meta where their AI expertise could be useful, Wang said. Axios previously reported some details of the job cuts.
Since the lackluster launch of Meta’s latest Llama large language model in the spring, the company has been on a crusade to reset its AI plans and stay competitive with other leading companies racing to develop cutting-edge AI technology.
Meta acquired a 49% stake in startup Scale AI and hired its CEO, Wang, to run a newly formed AI division focused on developing so-called superintelligence. Zuckerberg also became the company’s recruiter-in-chief, personally reaching out to prospective AI hires to invite them to his homes for meals and pitches on why they should join his company. Another part of the pitch was lofty multimillion-dollar pay packages.
Meta ultimately managed to poach more than 50 engineers, researchers, and other employees from competitors like OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, and Apple. Many of those hires are part of the secretive TBD Lab team at Meta, which has taken over development of the company’s models.
That team sits near Zuckerberg’s desk at Meta’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters and has separate badges to get into their designated section. None of the people on the team were affected by Wednesday’s cuts, according to the memo.
Meta, which has already increased the high end of its capital-expenditure projections for the year once, reports third-quarter earnings next week. The company previously said it planned to spend up to $72 billion on capex this year, largely on its AI endeavors.
Reddit Inc. sued Perplexity AI Inc. and three other companies over alleged data scraping from the discussion site without permission, a sign of the growing demand and value of original data in the burgeoning AI industry.
Three data scraping companies — Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi — have been collecting Reddit data via Google search results for the purpose of reselling it, according to the complaint filed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan. Perplexity has been buying that data from at least one of the companies, the suit alleges.
Reddit’s growing repository of data has become a valuable commodity given the rise in AI models that rely on massive troves of information for training and surfacing relevant results. Reddit has already inked deals with OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to license its data for training purposes, but has taken legal action against others it believes to be using the data without a formal agreement.
Reddit sued AI firm Anthropic earlier this year in San Francisco court over similar data scraping allegations.
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content — and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in a statement shared with Bloomberg News. “Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.”
Spokespeople for Perplexity, SerpApi, and Oxylabs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for AWMProxy couldn’t immediately be located.
The case is Reddit Inc. v. SerpApi LLC, 25-cv-08736, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
Amazon’s robotics ambitions can lead to multibillion-dollar cost cuts for the company, according to Morgan Stanley. Amazon plans to replace 600,000 jobs with robots in the coming years and, ultimately, is working towards its goal of automating 75% of its operations, The New York Times reported on Monday, citing several internal strategy documents. The e-commerce giant is planning to add about 40 next-generation robotics warehouses by the end of 2027 and has already begun overhauling old fulfillment centers, per the report. These efforts could wipe out thousands of full-time human jobs across Amazon’s warehouses over the next decade — and the money could start rolling in within just a few years. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak estimated that the shift could translate to between $2 billion and $4 billion of annual recurring savings for the company by 2027. The analyst reiterated his overweight rating and $300 price target on Amazon stock, which suggests it can jump 35.1%. This year, shares of Amazon are down about 0.3%, making the mega-cap tech stock the laggard among “Magnificent Seven” members. The slump has been due in part to Amazon’s light operating income guidance for the third quarter. Analysts who remain bullish on the stock are betting on growth in its cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, along with its retail sales and online advertising. “Near-ter,m we expect AWS growth to matter most for AMZN shares,” Nowak wrote in a Wednesday note to clients. “However, we continue to believe the market is under-appreciating AMZN’s GenAI advances in its Retail business with robotics-driven efficiencies.” AMZN 1Y mountain Amazon stock performance over the past year. To be sure, Morgan Stanley’s cost savings estimate could end up being on the softer end of Amazon’s own far-reaching goals. Nowak’s savings calculations were based on the estimated cost of about $3 to fulfill each Amazon order, with robots potentially making that process cheaper by 20% to 40%. That would then translate to savings of 60 cents to $1.20 per order. The analyst pointed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s comments made during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in 2024. Back then, Jassy mentioned that Amazon’s most advanced robotic warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, reduced fulfillment costs by around 25%. Jassy also said in July that Amazon was using more than 1 million robots across its facilities, which he said were “improving cost efficiencies” and leading to improved delivery times and lower costs for customers. “For perspective, we currently model AMZN ’27 company-wide EBIT of ~$124bn. That said, [Monday’s] report suggests the savings may actually be larger,” Nowak said. The Times reported that Amazon’s automation team thinks the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 U.S. human workers that it would otherwise need by 2027, which would reduce costs by roughly 30 cents on each item Amazon ships out to customers. In this case, Nowak said that savings of 30 cents per unit imply roughly $10 billion in savings. “This seems high to us (given next-gen robotics warehouses may only be fulfilling 10%-20% of units by then). But it will be important to follow up with AMZN and industry experts on these estimates, as it could imply AMZN is on pace for even larger than expected robotics savings,” Nowak said.