The head of Meta's AI will depart in group reorganization

After Sheryl Sandberg announced she was leaving as COO of Meta later this year, the company is losing another executive in the midst of a restructuring of its artificial intelligence group.

Jerome Pecenti, Meta's VP of AI for the past four years, will leave later this month as the company closely integrates its AI teams across different product groups, rather than letting AI act as one centralized organization. AI is already used for everything, from when you open Facebook and Instagram to ordering the software that powers the Oculus VR headset. The change is meant to "largely leverage the latest AI technology" across the company, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said in a post announcing the reorg.

The AI research team, led by Yann Lecan, Meta's chief AI scientist and early pioneer in the field, will move on to Bosworth's Reality Labs, further strengthening resources in the AR/VR division that has already reached more than 17,000 employees . AI is a vital component of building the hardware of the future. Meta hopes will define its vision of the metaverse. And, in the near term, the key is to compete better with TikTok, which has popularized a new way of using AI to suggest content.

"More centralized approaches run into their limits when the last mile proves too far for downstream teams to close the gap," Bosworth wrote. “With this new team structure, we are excited to push the limits of what AI can do and use it to create new features and products for billions of people.”