Meta’s famed AI research division has lost another top executive, with vice president Jitendra Malik announcing his departure to join Amazon’s robotics efforts. The exit comes amid growing unrest within FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), which some former employees have described as a “slow death” as Meta aggressively pivots toward commercial AI products. Malik’s resignation follows the recent departure of chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and adds to a growing exodus of top researchers who helped build Meta’s reputation as an AI powerhouse.Malik, who splits his time between Meta’s FAIR lab and UC Berkeley, announced Jan. 4 that he will lead Amazon’s robotics research in San Francisco starting Jan. 5. “It’s time to move on,” he wrote on X, highlighting its achievements including video action recognition models, touch sensors, and the recent SAM 3D breakthrough in computer vision.
FAIR’s Identity Crisis: From Blue Sky Research to Product Orientation
The departure caps a tumultuous year for FAIR, a unit once considered Meta’s crown jewel in AI development. From the CEO Mark Zuckerberg After launching its “Year of Intensity” campaign in January 2025, the lab underwent multiple reorganizations, faced budgetary constraints, and saw more than half of the authors of the original Llama research paper leave within months of its publication.Former FAIR researchers told Fortune earlier this year that Meta had gradually moved away from open exploration in favor of product-focused initiatives under the GenAI organization. The lab now has less computing power than teams focused on generative AI, according to former employees, although Meta declined to confirm details of resource allocation.In August, Meta consolidated its AI efforts by dividing the superintelligence labs into four teams, creating confusion over project ownership and team assignments. The reshuffle was followed by 600 job cuts in October, and AI Director Alexandr Wang decided the necessary layoffs to speed up decision-making.
Tensions simmer as LeCun criticizes LLM-focused strategy
This instability was compounded when LeCun left to pursue his own project on “world models” – a different path from the large language models that now define Meta’s approach to AI. In an interview with the Financial Times in December, LeCun admitted that Meta’s Llama 4 results were “a bit rigged” and criticized the company’s “LLM-pilled” focus as incompatible with achieving superintelligence.Former research scientist Tian Yuandong, who left Meta in November, told Chinese media that internal conflicts have emerged as computing resources become scarce amid the industry-wide LLM race. Another ex-employee, Joena Zhang, wrote that “no one really knew what anyone else was doing” during the first half of 2025 at what is now called Meta Superintelligence Labs.Meta says it remains committed to FAIR, and recent employee opinion surveys indicate improvement: optimism was at 80% by the end of 2025.