Research

Building with AI across all of Meta

June 2, 2022

Artificial Intelligence sits at the very heart of our work across Meta. In fact it would be hard to identify a single product that hasn’t been transformed by this work. Whether for personalization or protection, whether to improve existing services or create entirely novel ones, our future depends on our ability to leverage the newest AI technology at scale. To support this mission, today we are announcing a new decentralized organizational structure for Meta AI.

For the last several years the AI Organization here at Meta has been a key driver of improving our products as well as advancing fundamental research. Teams like AI Platform, AI for Product, and more recently AI4AR have developed state of the art techniques – drawing inspiration from their colleagues at FAIR and counterparts across the industry – to leverage AI to improve our products, to better protect the people who use them, and to build innovative new applications. These teams incubated countless new initiatives such as Responsible AI and have built a strong presence for Meta as a leader in the broader AI community.

Jerome Pesenti has been our fearless leader in this work but over the last several months he has put in place a plan to change the status quo. Jerome identified that while the centralized nature of the organization gave us leverage in some areas it also made it a challenge to integrate as deeply as we would hope. In the new model we will distribute the ownership of these AI systems back to Meta’s product groups. But we do so with the caveat that they must invest in a balanced portfolio that supports existing systems while also advancing the state of the art in AI. We believe that this will accelerate the adoption of important new technology across the company while allowing us to continue to push the envelope. The teams tasked with driving AI advancements and best practices into the products they support will be known as AI Innovation Centers.

Today we are announcing the following changes:

  • The Responsible AI organization will join the Social Impact team.

  • The AI for Product teams that work to protect the people using our platforms, improve recommendations and make content more relevant, and improve our Ads and Commerce services will move to our product engineering team.

  • The AI4AR team will join with the XR team in Reality Labs.

  • Our AI research team, FAIR, will become a new pillar within Reality Labs Research. Its mission and charter will remain unchanged: Drive fundamental breakthroughs in AI through research excellence, open science, and broad collaboration.

FAIR will continue to have incredibly strong leadership in place with Joelle Pineau, Antoine Bordes, and Yann LeCun.

As part of this transition, I am sorry to share that Jerome will depart Meta in mid-June after helping us through the early stages of this transition. We are grateful for the incredible work Jerome has done over the past 4+ years in building, leading, and scaling a world-class AI function for Meta.

To continue advancing both the AI technology and community at Meta we will also convene a new cross-functional AI leadership team led by Joelle. This group will be called upon to evaluate our progress in AI across the entire company. At our scale nothing comes easily. More centralized approaches run into their limits when the last mile proves to be too far for downstream teams to close the gap. With this new team structure, we are excited to push the boundaries of what AI can do and use it to create new features and products for billions of people.

Written By

Andrew Bosworth

Chief Technology Officer