Meta hits the breaks on AI hiring amid growing bubble concerns: WSJ

(KRON) — Amid growing fears of an artificial intelligence bubble, Meta has reportedly hit the brakes on AI hiring. The Facebook parent company has spent the last few months in a frenzied hiring spree, reportedly dangling $100 million bonuses to try and lure top talent from competitors like ChatGPT and Google DeepMind.

However, according to a report Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, the Menlo Park-based tech giant has put a pause on future AI hires as of last week. The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that the freeze coincides with a restructuring of Meta’s AI group and prohibits current employees from moving across teams inside the AI division.

The duration of the hiring freeze is not known, the WSJ reported.

Any new AI hires would have to be approved by Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang, according to the Journal’s sources. Wang, incidentally, is a 28-year-old billionaire who previously ran Scale AI before Meta acquired the company for $14.3 billion earlier this summer.

Meta’s abrupt halt on AI hiring comes amidst growing worries about a potential AI bubble burst, with some likening the current market frenzy over the technology to the 1990s dot.com boom and subsequent bust. Further fueling concerns is a recent report from MIT that among other things, determined that 95% of companies that have implemented generative AI have seen zero return.

Meta has been among the more aggressive of Big Tech’s old guard in terms of AI investment. In addition to its well-documented talent-poaching, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently published a blog post outlining his vision to develop an AI “Personal Superintelligence.”

For now, it seems like superintelligence, while not canceled, may be delayed as a Meta spokesperson confirmed the hiring freeze to Reuters, calling it “basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”

Further adding to AI bubble butterflies that have seen Big Tech stocks wobble is the lukewarm reception to ChatGPT’s much-anticipated GPT-5, and the admission from the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, that we’re entering into an AI bubble.

San Francisco has positioned itself as the self-declared “AI Capital of the World.”