Social media giant Meta has reportedly disbanded its division responsible for regulating its artificial intelligence (AI) ventures as they are developed and deployed.
According to a report, many team members of Meta’s responsible AI division have transitioned to roles within the generative AI product division at the company, with some joining the AI infrastructure team.
Meta’s generative AI team, established in February, focuses on developing products that generate language and images to mimic the equivalent human-made version. It came as companies across the tech industry poured money into machine learning development to avoid being left behind in the AI race. Meta is among the Big Tech companies playing catch-up since the AI boom took off.
The RAI restructuring comes as the Facebook parent nears the end of its “year of efficiency,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it during a February earnings call. So far, that has played out as a flurry of layoffs, team mergers and redistributions at the company.
Ensuring AI’s safety has become a priority of top players in the space, especially as regulators and other officials pay closer attention to the nascent technology’s potential harms. In July, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI formed an industry group focused specifically on setting safety standards as AI advances.
