Zuckerberg suddenly dismantled the AI ​​department, LeCun was forced to join the Metaverse, Meta was in turmoil and executives continued to leave

Mengchen Xiaoxiao sent from Aofei Temple
Quantum Bit | Public Account QbitAI

Meta's top management is in turmoil, and it hasn't stopped yet...

The entire AI department was revealed to be reorganized just one day after the second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg announced her resignation.

Now, Jerome Pesenti , vice president of AI , has also announced that he will leave later in June.

At the same time, a series of changes at the organizational structure level have also surfaced.

The most important news is that the former Facebook AI Research Institute FAIR will be incorporated into Reality Labs, the core department of the Metaverse.

At the same time, the AI ​​algorithm team supporting its major APPs was transferred to the product engineering team, the AI4AR team joined the XR hardware team, and the "Responsible Artificial Intelligence Organization" was incorporated into the social impact team.

In a nutshell, break up .

Interestingly, the entire plan was personally led by the departing Pesenti.

He believes that the centralized AI organization in the past brought a lot of external influence to Meta, but encountered obstacles in the deep integration of technology and applications.

The new architecture will distribute ownership of AI systems to product groups, accelerating the implementation of new technologies across the company.

He also abolished the position of Vice President of AI himself. After the transition period is completed, he will leave Meta. His next destination has not yet been disclosed.

In a series of shocks, everyone is most concerned about FAIR …

Where is FAIR heading?

Regarding the fate of FAIR, the person in charge, Meta chief scientist LeCun , also made a series of responses.

First, he confirmed that FAIR will become an organization under the Reality Labs Research Department (RLR) , led by Michael Abrash, and AI will only be a part of RLR's research scope.

Secondly, FAIR’s internal organizational structure remains unchanged, with LeCun still in charge of the strategic direction and co-leading it with two managers, Joelle Pineau and Antoine Bordes.

Finally, the name FAIR now has a new meaning. F no longer stands for Facebook, but Fundamental .

Together they form the “Basic AI Research Institute.”

So, now that it has been incorporated into a laboratory focusing on AR/VR , will the research direction change?

LeCun’s response is that this is not entirely true.

Reality Labs is now more than just VR. To use a PR phrase:

“New technologies dedicated to connecting people to the digital world can be understood as the next generation of computing platforms, including the Metaverse, of which AI is a key element.”

In fact, although the name Reality Labs doesn’t sound impressive and is just a “laboratory”, it has actually become the core of the Metaverse.

Reality Labs was originally developed from the Oculus VR device business , and later added hardware products such as smart glasses and mixed reality helmets and enterprise solutions.

It is now an important department responsible for realizing Zuckerberg's metaverse vision.

According to a recent report by The Verge, Reality Labs has added approximately 7,000 employees in just one year, and its total number of employees has exceeded 17,000.

In terms of numbers, it accounts for one-fifth of the entire company .

Meta, which is determined to follow the Metaverse route, has not had smooth sailing. Since the release of its annual report in February, its market value has evaporated by $251.3 billion overnight, and its stock price has not recovered yet.

Reality Labs' annual loss is as high as $10 billion. The latest Q2 financial report shows that its costs have increased by 55% year-on-year, which is higher than the growth rate of revenue, which means that the loss will continue to expand this year.

Recently, Meta's current chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth also revealed that some Reality Labs projects are being scaled back or postponed, and recruiting for certain positions has been stopped.

Since entering 2022, Meta's AI talents have also been lost .

At least four well-known AI researchers left, including Edward Grefenstette, who led reinforcement learning research, and Heinrich Kuttler, AI research engineering manager. Even the AI ​​laboratory in London lost most of its top researchers.

At that time, the outside world did not quite understand the reasons for this wave of resignations. Now it seems that it may be the impact of this organizational structure adjustment.

It remains unknown how FAIR will be treated in the future as a department of Reality Labs.

Since All in Metaverse, at least 20+ executives have left

In fact, this series of changes in FAIR is just the tip of the iceberg of the entire Meta shock.

Since Zuckerberg announced that he would go all in on the Metaverse, more than 20 core executives and top AI scientists have left Meta.

Among these executives who "left", from CTO to heads of various departments, many had worked at Meta for more than 5 years or even more than 10 years.

According to statistics from Sina Technology, 18 core executives resigned in 2021 alone when the company officially announced its name change to Meta.

On the one hand, many technical executives in various fields have already left their jobs.

The biggest change was Mike Schroepfer, who had served as the company's CTO for nearly 9 years before leaving .

During his tenure, he led Facebook to address the rampant false, pornographic, gambling, and drug-related content on the platform. During this period, Facebook also developed a product called virtual assistant Facebook M (similar to Siri) , but later this project was cut for various reasons.

Correspondingly, Andrew Bosworth, the department head who was previously responsible for Metaverse-related projects, replaced him as the new CTO.

But in fact, many leaders of virtual reality, AR/VR related projects did not stay long.

Including Reality Labs vice president of business partnerships Hugo Barra, AR/VR content vice president Mike Verdu, Facebook AI product director Ragavan Srinivasan and others, all resigned last year.

It was like this last year and it is also like this year.

Around January this year, many Meta AI scientists resigned, some joined Google, and some joined startups like Hugging Face.

In March, Nikhil Chandhok, head of Meta AR glasses, announced his resignation; in April, CNBC reported that at least four core AI technical personnel had left Meta AI, many of whom were experts who had published dozens of papers in top journals/top conferences.

On the other hand, there are executive changes in core businesses such as advertising .

For example, David Fischer, chief revenue officer (CRO) , who was primarily responsible for the company's advertising business and oversaw sales and marketing departments , and Carolyn Everson, vice president of global advertising sales, both left last year.

In addition, people including Facebook App head Fidji Simo and business vice president Deborah Liu, Facebook digital wallet head David Marcus and vice president Kevin Weil, and product vice president Asha Sharma have also left.

Just yesterday, Meta’s second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg officially announced her resignation from the COO position, which undoubtedly pushed this wave of “resignations” to its peak.

Previously, Sandberg's position in the company was very important, and some people even described her as a "shadow CEO."

During Sandberg's tenure, he led Meta's advertising business from zero to its current annual revenue of $115 billion, which is also one of Meta's main sources of income.

Today, advertising revenue still accounts for 97% of Meta's total revenue , but the growth of this business is declining year by year.

It is worth mentioning that in Sandberg’s “thousand-word farewell letter”, there was no mention of his outlook or views on the Metaverse, but only a review of his work experience at Meta over the past decade.

As for whether Meta can survive in the concept of the metaverse after this wave of changes has passed, only time will tell.

One More Thing

In fact, FAIR was once a " star AI laboratory " that produced a large number of cutting-edge research and a group of big names .

Since LeCun founded FAIR in 2013, it has not only had a great influence within Meta, but has also developed a large number of basic research results, codes and data sets externally, becoming a legendary organization in the industry.

In terms of research talent , in addition to LeCun, one of the three leaders, there are also Tian Yuandong, He Kaiming and other industry giants who have made many top-level research results here.

In terms of deep learning frameworks , from the earliest Torch to PyTorch, they have become the leading frameworks in the entire ecosystem, especially in academia.

In terms of industrial algorithms , Mask R-CNN and its subsequent improved variants once became the mainstream solution for instance segmentation in the industry.

Open source tools Detectron, a target detection platform, and Fairseq, a sequence modeling toolset, are among the most popular projects on GitHub.

Frontier Research Self-supervised learning has always been the research direction that FAIR attaches the most importance to. From MaskFeat to the recent MAE, it has paved a new path for self-supervised learning in the CV field.

Four years ago, when LeCun resigned from FAIR management and took office as chief AI scientist, Tian Yuandong, Wu Yuxin and other researchers who were still at FAIR said that there was no product pressure in this department .

Today, although LeCun's identity as chief AI scientist has not changed, the FAIR established at that time has been transferred to another department.

Not only that, judging from LeCun’s revelation, Meta AI is also about to start “product-oriented” research.

If we say that this group of AI experts made so many basic scientific research achievements without "product pressure".

Now that Meta AI is facing organizational restructuring and its goal has shifted to product development, can these scientists still conduct basic scientific research happily and without pressure?

In other words, can these people remain stable?

Reference links:
[1] https://ai.facebook.com/blog/building-with-ai-across-all-of-meta/ [2] https://twitter.com/schrep/status/1532394011033407488 [3] https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1532423448282157061 [4] https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/2/23151819/meta-head-of-ai-jerome-pesenti-to-depart-in-reorg [5] https://www.axios.com/2022/06/02/meta-facebook-ai-decentralize [6] https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/18/23125571/meta-hiring-freeze-commerce-messenger-kids-facebook-gaming [7] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-facebook-owner-meta-tells-hardware-staffers-prepare-cutbacks-2022-05-11/