After months of aggressively recruiting top talent and offering eye-popping pay packages, Meta has abruptly frozen hiring in its artificial intelligence division, insiders say. Sources tell the Wall Street Journal that the company is pausing recruitment after a spree that added more than 50 AI specialists to its roster. The freeze, which began last week, comes as the company reshuffles its AI operations and restricts existing employees from jumping between teams. There's no word yet on how long the pause will last, though exceptions could be made with approval from Alexandr Wang, the company's chief AI officer.
A Meta spokesperson cast the move as routine: part of "basic organizational planning" to build a firm foundation for the company's push into "superintelligence" and to align with annual budgeting. Industry analysts, however, have flagged worries that the escalating pay packages—sometimes worth nine figures—could erode shareholder returns, especially as Meta's stock-based compensation costs climb. CNBC reports that some signing bonuses are believed to have been as high as $100 million. In the deal that brought Wang to the company, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a stake in his startup Scale AI.
Meta's AI arm is now split into four units, including the newly formed TBD Lab focused on superintelligence, a product group, an infrastructure team, and the exploratory Fundamental AI Research division, which remains largely untouched. All these sit under the Meta Superintelligence Labs umbrella, reflecting Mark Zuckerberg's ambitions for AI systems that can outperform humans.
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The shake-up follows the underwhelming release of Meta's latest Llama large language models and the quiet disbandment of the AGI Foundations team, which worked on the models. Since the spring, Zuckerberg has taken a hands-on approach to recruitment, targeting talent from rivals like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The Journal reports the effort lured around 20 researchers and engineers away from OpenAI and at least 13 from Google, along with others from Apple, xAI, and Anthropic.
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