Meta has reportedly disbanded its division responsible for regulating its AI ventures as they are developed and deployed.
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 restructuring comes as Facebook’s parent company 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 company layoffs, team mergers and redistributions.
Ensuring AI 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 on setting safety standards as AI advances.
According to the report, responsible AI division team members have been redistributed within the company but remain committed to supporting responsible AI development and use, emphasizing ongoing investment in this area.
The company recently introduced two AI-powered generative models. The first, Emu Video, leverages Meta’s previous Emu model and can generate video clips based on text and image inputs. The second model, Emu Edit, is focused on image manipulation, promising more precision in image editing.
