The business is losing another executive amid a restructure of its artificial intelligence department, just a day after Sheryl Sandberg announced her departure as COO later this year.


Jerome Pesenti, Meta's VP of AI for the past four years, will leave later this month as the firm integrates his AI teams throughout several product groups rather than having AI work as a centralized organization, as opposed to having AI function as a centralized organization. From the software that powers the Oculus VR headset to the software that orders what you see when you open Facebook and Instagram, AI is already in use. According to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the reorganization would allow the business to "use the latest AI technologies at scale" across the board.


The AI research team, lead by Yann LeCun, Meta's top AI scientist and an early pioneer in the area, will relocate to Bosworth's Reality Labs, combining resources in the AR/VR business, which has grown to over 17,000 workers. AI is a crucial component of the future hardware that Meta believes to define its metaverse vision. In the short term, it's also necessary to compete more effectively with TikTok, which has popularized a new technique of using AI to recommend content.


"When the last mile proves to be too distant for downstream teams to close the gap," stated Bosworth, "more centralized techniques run into their constraints." "We're delighted to explore the frontiers of what AI can achieve with this new team structure and utilize it to develop new features and products for billions of users."