Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is freezing all hiring in its artificial intelligence division.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company characterized the hiring freeze as “basic organizational planning,” coinciding with a broader restructuring of its AI division’s leadership.

It’s a notable admission that comes as Zuckerberg has been desperately offering key talent mind-boggling financial offers, reportedly reaching $1 billion — with seriously mixed results — that highlight its frantic attempts to catch up in the AI race.

Analysts, however, have balked at the CEO’s costly attempts to poach workers from competing AI firms, per the WSJ, raising concerns that compensating them with enormous stock offers could undercut shareholder returns.

The AI industry as a whole is facing a critical juncture, with mounting concerns contributing to a massive tech selloff roiling the stock market this week. Shares of AI tech stalwarts, including Nvidia and Palantir, have plummeted — raising concerns that the hype had driven their valuations too high for the shaky realities of their current tech.

As part of the company’s restructuring, Meta’s so-called Superintelligence Labs will now house four different divisions. One department, dubbed AGI Foundations, which worked on the company’s latest Llama large language models, was dissolved. A disastrous April release of its “Behemoth” AI model drew widespread criticism and accusations of fudging benchmarks to make it look more capable than it really is.

At least three members of the AGI Foundations team announced they were leaving Meta, the WSJ reports.

Up until the hiring freeze, Meta added over 50 new employees for its AI efforts, including 20 researchers and engineers from OpenAI, and at least 13 from Google.

But whether the company — and the AI industry as a whole — will ultimately justify the hiring spree remains to be seen. Firms are still spending tens of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure buildouts that broadly eclipse actual revenue.

For his part, Zuckerberg remains adamant that his new team will deliver, claiming that “automating all valuable work” will put “power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.”

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Origianl Creator:Victor Tangermann
Original Link: https://futurism.com/meta-freezes-ai-hiring-fear
Originally Posted: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 19:18:30 +0000