Facebook subsidiary Meta has dismantled its responsible AI team

Meta has disbanded its Responsible AI department, the team dedicated to regulating the safety of its AI projects as they are developed and deployed, according to a Meta spokesperson.

Most of the RAI team members have been reassigned to the company’s generative AI product division, while others will now work in the AI ​​infrastructure team, the spokesperson said. The news was first published by the information.

The Geneative AI team, which was born in February, is focused on developing products that generate language and images to mimic the human-made equivalent. This came as companies across the technology industry poured money into developing machine learning so as not to be left behind in the AI ​​race. Meta is among the big tech companies that have been trying to catch up since the AI ​​boom began.

RAI’s restructuring comes as Facebook’s parent company approaches the end of its “year of efficiency,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it during a February earnings call. So far, it’s been a wave of layoffs, team consolidations, and reallocations across the company.

Ensuring the safety of AI has become a stated priority for major players in the field, especially as regulators and other officials pay greater attention to the potential harms of the emerging technology. In July, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI formed an industry group specifically focused on setting safety standards as AI advances.

Although RAI staff are now spread across the organization, the spokesperson noted that they will continue to support the “responsible development and use of AI.”

“We continue to prioritize and invest in the development of safe and responsible AI,” the spokesperson said.