Meta's Laid Off Employees Offered AI Startup Job By Indian-Origin Founder

Smallest AI, a US-based startup in San Francisco, offered jobs to Meta employees who were laid off from its AI department in its latest round of job cuts.

Approximately 600 jobs were lost, according to Bloomberg, the mass layoffs were part of Meta's efforts to maintain its lead in the AI race against its competitors Open AI and Google. They were laid off from the artificial intelligence unit Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Kamath made a post on social media platform X, stating that the company is hiring a speech team. He offered salaries ranging from $200,000 to $600,000, which is more than half a million dollars. He also offered flexible equity options to those who join up.

"Looking for - experience with speech evals, speech generation, full duplex speech to speech," he said.

He also encouraged interested applicants to message him on X.

Bloomberg reported that Meta is encouraging the laid-off employees to apply to jobs in other positions within the company and said that it would keep hiring for its AI teams in the future.

“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, wrote in a memo to coworkers.

Meta has spent upwards to a billion dollars to acquire top talent from across the industry, which includes a $14.3 billion investment in data labeling startup Scale AI, which led to Wang joining Meta and spearheading its AI operations.