A day after Sheryl Sandberg announced she was leaving as COO of Meta later this year, the company is losing another executive due to a reorganization of its artificial intelligence group.
Jerome Pesenti, Meta’s VP of AI for the past four years, will leave at the end of this month as the company more closely integrates its AI teams across various product groups instead of having an AI function as a centralized organization. AI is already used for everything from ordering what you see when you open Facebook and Instagram, to the software that powers the Oculus VR headset. The change is aimed at “enhancing the latest AI technology at scale” across the company, said Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. in a poster announcing the reorg.
The AI research team led by Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist and early pioneer in the field, will relocate to Bosworth’s Reality Labs, consolidating resources in the AR / VR division, which has already swelled to more than 17,000 employees. AI is a critical component in building the future hardware Meta hopes to define its vision of the metaverse. And, in the near term, it’s key to better compete with TikTok, which has popularized a new way AI is used to suggest content.
“More centralized approaches meet their limits when the last mile proves to be too far away for upstream teams to close the gap,” Bosworth wrote. “With this new team structure, we’re excited to push the boundaries of what AI can do and use it to create new features and products for billions of people.”