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Meta's high-level turmoil has not stopped...
The entire AI department was restructured, just the day after Sheryl Sandberg announced his resignation.
Now Vice President of AI Jerome Pesenti, 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 of these, the former Facebook AI Research Institute FAIR, will be merged into Reality Labs, the core department of the metaverse.
At the same time, the AI algorithm team that supports its major apps is transferred to the product engineering team, the AI4AR team joins the XR hardware team, and the "Responsible Artificial Intelligence Organization" is merged into the social impact team.
In a word, scattered.
Interestingly, the whole plan was carried out by the soon-to-be-departed Pesenti himself.
He believes that the centralized AI organization in the past has brought a lot of external influence to Meta, but has encountered obstacles in the deep integration of technology and applications.
The new architecture will assign ownership of AI systems to product groups, accelerating the company-wide adoption of new technologies.
The position of vice president of AI has also been changed by himself, and he will leave Meta after the transition period is completed, and the next step has not yet been revealed.
And in a series of shocks, everyone is most concerned about FAIR...
WHERE DOES FAIR GO FROM HERE
For the fate of FAIR, the head of the meta, LeCun, also issued a series of responses.
First, he confirmed that FAIR would be part of reality Labs Research Unit (RLR), led by Michael Abrash, and that AI was only part of the RLR research spectrum.
Second, fair's internal organizational structure remains unchanged, and LeCun still grasps the strategic direction, co-led with two managers, Joelle Pineau and Antoine Bordes.
Finally, the name FAIR now has a new meaning, with F no longer representing Facebook, but Fundamental.
Taken together, it is the "Basic AI Research Institute".
So, now that it is incorporated into the laboratory focusing on AR/VR, will the research direction change?
LeCun's response is that it's not entirely the same.
Reality Labs is now more than just VR, to use a set of PR rhetoric:
"New technologies committed to connecting people with the digital world can be understood as next-generation computing platforms, including metaversities, and AI is a key element of this."
Actually, don't look at the Reality Labs name doesn't sound too good just a "lab", but it has actually become the metaverse core of Meta.
Reality Labs was first developed from the Oculus VR device business, and later added hardware products such as smart glasses and mixed reality headsets and enterprise solutions.
It is now an important department responsible for realizing Zuckerberg's vision of a meta-universe.
According to a recent report by The Verge, Reality Labs has grown about 7,000 employees in just one year, with a total of more than 17,000 employees.
In terms of numbers, it has accounted for one-fifth of the entire company.
The iron-hearted Meta that takes the meta-cosmic route is not all smooth sailing. Since the release of the annual financial report in February, the market value evaporated by $251.3 billion overnight, and the stock price has not eased up so far.
Reality Labs lost as much as $10 billion a year, and the latest Q2 earnings report showed that its costs increased by another 55% year-on-year, faster than the growth rate of revenue, meaning that losses will widen this year.
Recently, Andrew Bosworth, Meta's current chief technology officer, also revealed that some Reality Labs projects are being scaled back or postponed and that recruitment for certain positions has been stopped.
Since entering 2022, Meta's AI talent is also being lost.
At least four well-known AI researchers, including Edward Grefenstette, who led reinforcement learning research, and Heirich Kuttler, AI research engineering manager, left. Even the London-based AI lab lost most of its top researchers.
At that time, the reason for this wave of departures was not well understood, and now it seems that it may be the impact of this organizational restructuring.
In the future, when FAIR becomes a division of Reality Labs, it is still unknown how it will be treated.
All in Metaverse since at least 20+ executives have left
In fact, this series of changes in FAIR is only the "tip of the iceberg" of the entire Meta shock.
Since Zuckerberg announced the all-in metaverse, Meta has had 20+ core executives and top AI scientists left.
Among these "exodus" executives, from the CTO to the heads of various departments, many of them have worked at Meta for more than 5 years, or even 10 years.
According to Sina Technology statistics, in 2021, when the official announcement changed its name to Meta, there were 18 core executives who left.
On the one hand, technical executives in many fields have left one after another.
The biggest change is mike Schroepfer, who was the company's CTO for nearly 9 years before leaving.
During his tenure, he led Facebook to tackle the proliferation of fake and pornographic gambling content on the platform, and during which time Facebook also developed a product called virtual assistant Facebook M (similar to Siri), but the project was later cut for various reasons.
In contrast, Andrew Bosworth, the former head of the department responsible for metaverse-related projects, replaced him as the new CTO.
But in fact, many heads of virtual reality and AR/VR-related projects have not stayed for long.
Hugo Barra, vice president of commercial cooperation at Reality Labs, Mike Verdu, vice president of AR/VR content, and Ragavan Srinivasan, facebook's head of AI products, all resigned last year.
This was true last year, and it is true this year.
Around January this year, a number of Meta AI scientists left, some joining Google and others joining startups like Hug Face.
In March, Nikhil Chandhok, head of Meta AR glasses, announced his departure; in April, CNBC reported that Meta AI had at least four core AI technology backbones left, many of whom were big bulls who had published dozens of papers in the top journal/summit.
On the other hand, there is a change in executives in core businesses such as advertising.
For example, David Fischer, chief revenue officer (CRO), who oversees the company's advertising business and oversees sales and marketing, and Carolyn Everson, vice president of global advertising sales, left last year.
In addition, including Fidji Simo, head of Facebook App, Deborah Liu, vice president of commerce, David Marcus, head of Facebook's digital wallet, and Kevin Weil, vice president of product, and Asha Sharma, vice president of product, have also left.
Just yesterday, Sheryl Sandberg, the number two person in Meta, officially resigned from the COO position, which undoubtedly pushed this wave of "departures" to the peak.
Previously, Sandberg's position in the company was so important that some people even described her as a "shadow CEO.".
During his tenure, Sandberg led TheRa's advertising business from zero to $115 billion in annual revenue today, which is one of Meta's main sources of revenue.
Advertising revenue still accounts for 97% of Meta's total revenue today, but the growth of this business is declining year by year.
It is worth mentioning that in Sandberg's "thousand-word farewell letter", there is no mention of the outlook or view of the metaverse, but only a review of his work experience in Meta in the past ten years.
As for whether Meta can survive in the concept of metaverse after this wave of change has passed, it is up to time to judge.
One More Thing
In fact, FAIR was once a "star AI lab" that produced a lot of cutting-edge research and a batch of big cattle.
Since the establishment of LeCun in 2013, FAIR has not only had a lot of influence within Meta, but also developed a large number of basic research results, code and data sets, becoming a legendary organization in the industry.
In terms of research talents, in addition to LeCun, one of the leaders of the three giants, there are also industry giants such as Tian Yuandong and He Kaiming who have made many top-level research results here.
In terms of deep learning framework, from the earliest Torch to PyTorch, it has become the dominant in the entire ecosystem, especially in academia.
In terms of industrial algorithms, Mask R-CNN and its subsequent improvement variants once became the mainstream solution of industry instance segmentation.
Open source tools, object detection platform Detectron, sequence modeling toolset Fairseq are among the most popular projects on GitHub.
In cutting-edge research, self-supervised learning has always been the most important research direction of FAIR, from MaskFeat to the recent MAE, paving a new path for self-supervised learning in the CV field.
Four years ago, when LeCun stepped down from fair management and became chief AI scientist, researchers such as Tian Yuandong and Wu Yuxin, who were still at FAIR, said that there was no pressure on products in this sector.
Today, although leCun's identity as chief AI scientist has not changed, the THEN ESTABLISHMENT OF FAIR has been completely transferred to another department.
Not only that, from LeCun's disclosure, Meta AI is also going to start "product-oriented" research.
If you say that the previous batch of AI bulls made so many basic scientific research achievements in the case of "no product pressure".
Now that Meta AI is facing organizational changes and the goal has changed to product-oriented, can these scientists still engage in basic scientific research happily and without stress?
Or 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/
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