Meta halted all hiring for its artificial intelligence division, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, and is even pausing movement between teams within the company.
After
confirming the hiring freeze, a Meta spokesperson told the newspaper it
was “basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our
new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and
undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”

It’s
all part of restructuring within the division, creating new teams to
focus on different aspects of the business, the Journal reported. One is
said to be working on superintelligence, while others are dedicated to
products, infrastructure and long-term projects.

Meta did not respond to SFGATE’s request for confirmation and comment as of publication Friday.

A post on X Thursday from Alexandr Wang,
Meta’s chief AI officer, appeared to push against the reporting of the
hiring freeze: “We are truly only investing more and more into Meta
Superintelligence Labs as a company. Any reporting to the contrary of
that is clearly mistaken,” he wrote.

The news comes just weeks after reports of Meta making eye-popping hiring efforts to acquire AI workers, including some pay packages that may have reached up to $100 million, according to Wired.
Meta has been aggressively amping up its AI efforts in the past two
years, even scooping up San Francisco data-labeling startup Scale AI
this June for a reported $14.3 billion and taking select employees
along with it. That’s in addition to luring 11 new hires from OpenAI,
Anthropic and Google, Bloomberg found.

This
poaching could seem egregious, but it’s part of an overall war between
tech companies fighting for the most highly coveted AI talent. It’s even
been likened to sports trading in athletics, with one package reportedly valued at $1.5 billion.

This reveal, coupled with a warning about an “AI bubble” from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, caused tech stocks to tumble
earlier this week. As of Friday, however, stocks have somewhat
rebounded after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated an
interest rate cut could be coming.

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