The news: Meta is restructuring its AI teams to accelerate and streamline product development.

The company is dividing responsibilities between two main groups:

• AI products team. This unit will work on consumer-facing tools, such as the Meta AI app and generative AI (genAI) features on its social media platforms, per Axios.
• AGI foundations unit. This team will focus on longer-term efforts like improving Llama models, advanced reasoning, and voice-generation technologies.

“Our new structure aims to give each organization more ownership while minimizing (but making explicit) team dependencies,” Meta chief product officer Chris Cox said.

Why it matters: By separating fast-moving consumer products from deep research, Meta can move nimbly, create clearer roadmaps, speed up decision-making across product lines, and reallocate resources more easily.

Looking back: In 2023, as genAI popularity surged, Meta reorganized all of its AI efforts into a single division. Since then, its genAI projects have expanded across both software and hardware.

Meta embedded AI in hardware products like the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses as well as in comment- and image-generation features across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

In April, Meta released optimized versions of its open-source Llama 4 reasoning model.

Following the money: Separating AI projects into different teams would let Meta evaluate which AI bets are worth scaling and which should be slowed down without halting the company’s overall AI progress.

Restructuring could help the AI divisions avoid the long-standing budgeting problems that Reality Labs has faced—its umbrella department of wearables and VR development has lost billions of dollars. By creating distinct AI units with separate budgets, Meta can more easily keep track of spending and justify it to investors.

Our take: Splitting AI into smaller, more autonomous teams could help Meta support faster development of consumer tools and give bigger-picture research the space it needs.

Restructuring could also help Meta pursue its long-running goal of evolving from a social media company into a more diverse tech leader with an AI-first mission.