After making job offers worth millions of dollars, Meta stops AI hiring

A month ago, Meta announced its Superintelligence initiative with a goal to build AI models that ultimately lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stage where AI can outperform humans. To form the team responsible for accomplishing this, Meta hired top AI researchers, scientists, and executives across OpenAI, Google, and Apple, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself personally reaching out with "ridiculous" job offers, sometimes even worth hundreds of millions of dollars. After spending an insane amount of money in this venture, the company has finally put an AI hiring in freeze.

The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that after hiring over 50 AI researchers and scientists, Meta has initiated a hiring freeze that also restricts employees inside the AI division from moving across teams. The duration of this freeze hasn't been disclosed, but "external" AI hirings still seem like an option, as long as they have the express approval of Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang.

Meta confirmed the freeze, but downplayed its significance, noting that it is a part of "basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises."

Meta currently has a Superintelligence Labs umbrella that consists of four teams. One is "TBD Lab" focusing specifically on achieving superintelligence and comprising of most of the new hires, the second is developing AI products, the third works on infrastructure, and a fourth one that experiments with longer-term initiatives.

It's not exactly known what triggered the AI hiring freeze, but it may have to do with investor concerns over the extravagant expenditure that was undertaken to build the Superintelligence team, whose compensation packages also put a dent in shareholder returns. Zuckerberg went on his hiring spree shortly after the company's Llama models underperformed expectations. These LLMs were built by the AGI Foundations team, which was dissolved during the recent restructuring and hiring.