Meta’s AI Research Lab Is "Dying A Slow Death"

When Meta’s head of AI research, Joelle Pineau, announced her departure last week, many wondered what was happening with FAIR—the once-famed Meta AI lab she had led for the past two years, Sharon Goldman reported for Fortune Tech.

Meta is now refocusing on the ambitious long-term goal of what it calls AMI (advanced machine intelligence). I Image: Meta AI

FAIR—short for Fundamental AI Research—was once the crown jewel of AI development at Meta.

But the lab has been “dying a slow death,” according to seven former Meta employees who spoke to Fortune last week, saying it has been sidelined by more commercially focused AI teams within the company.

In an email to Fortune, Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, said the lab is on the cusp of “a new beginning,” and is now refocusing on the ambitious long-term goal of what Meta calls AMI (advanced machine intelligence).

However, former employees, including ex–FAIR researchers, say the organization has been slowly withering in recent years, as “blue sky” research across Big Tech has declined.

“This is happening industrywide,” said a former FAIR researcher who left in 2021. “More and more people are being forced to move into generative AI.”

Yet Erik Meijer, a former Meta engineer and researcher whose team was laid off in 2022, said he was “never a fan” of research divisions inside companies like Meta.

“If companies want to do fundamental research, they should give money with no strings attached to universities,” he said. He added: “I think it is great… that Meta is putting, to borrow a Google saying, ‘more wood behind fewer arrows.’”