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| Meta lays off the entire machine learning research team |
Mark Zuckerberg, president of the Facebook-owned Meta Group, announced yesterday that more than 11,000 employees have been laid off and shared a message to employees that workers in artificial intelligence and machine learning can pay for the layoffs.
We've shifted more resources into some of our high-priority growth areas like B: AI-based content discovery engines, advertising and business platforms departments, and our long-term vision for the Metaverse," Zuckerberg said in his letter.
Today, however, Thomas Ahle, a fired META researcher, tweeted, “They have been fired and the entire research organization called Probability is focused on applying machine learning to IT.”
Thomas added, "The (probability) team has 50 members. They are divided into 19 people working on Bayesian probabilistic models, 9 people on evaluation and recommendation, 5 people on supervision of machine learning efficiency model improvement, and 17 people on designing intelligence aggregation models. artificial, director and others".
Another team member, Senior Software Engineer (Emily McMillan) tweeted: "It took about 7 years at META to find such a great team at Probability, and unfortunately the journey ends here."
Weeks after Meta's stock price plunged -- following its third-quarter earnings report -- Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees that he was conducting a comprehensive review of infrastructure spending.
“As we grow our AI infrastructure and focus on improving efficiency, our infrastructure will continue to be an important feature of Meta, and I believe we can achieve this at low cost,” he wrote.
According to the Probability team's website, the team's mission is to make machine learning more accessible to engineers by integrating deep machine learning into Facebook's programming language, developer tools, and infrastructure.
Zuckerberg in particular sees the layoffs as "the most difficult change in company history," which he attributes to the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic and economic slowdown.
And he announced in his letter yesterday, compensation for the laid-off employees, who will receive financial compensation for a period of four months without specifying a ceiling for compensation for each year of work in the company, in addition to a two-month salary.
He added that in addition to the annual share of the company's shares as an annual bonus, the terminated employees will also receive a financial allowance for the leave they did not receive, which they can get in November of each year, in addition to three months of social benefits in the company. The partner provides employment support. This includes giving laid-off superior employees early access to open positions.
The Meta Group, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it had 87,000 employees as of September last year.
The group has been in unprecedented turmoil since the start of the year, losing more than 70% of its value since Zuckerberg announced that he would rename his company Meta and focus on building the Metaverse. Earlier this month, Meta shares plunged 24% to their lowest level in nearly four years after delivering a quarterly earnings report that Wall Street analysts described as disastrous.
He also announced the loss of 500,000 Facebook users, which resulted in a continuous decline in advertising budgets, and Apple's new privacy policies for its user data, which will hit the mobile advertising department in an unprecedented way and cost Facebook more than 10 billion dollars. .
But Mark Zuckerberg insisted on investing more in the Metaverse project, spending billions of dollars on it while investors turned against it.
19 people doing Bayesian Modeling, 9 people doing Ranking and Recommendations, 5 people doing ML Efficiency, 17 people doing AI for Chip Design and Compilers. Plus managers and such.
— Thomas Ahle (@thomasahle) November 10, 2022
It took me almost 7 years at Meta to find a team as amazing as Probability.
— emily mcmilin (@micmylin) November 10, 2022
Sad this train ride is coming to an end, but I am super lucky to be with the Probability folks for this final ride.