Meta layoffs: Indian-origin AI startup founder offers jobs to laid-off employees — this is how much they will earn

Meta Layoffs: Amid news of Meta laying off 600 employees from its new AI team, many startups and entrepreneurs have offered jobs to such people who have lost their positions at Mark Zuckerberg's Superintelligence Labs. The latest among them is Indian-origin entrepreneur Sudarshan Kamath, founder of Smallest AI.

The US-based tech leader took to X on Thursday to announce that his company will hire laid-off employees from Meta for its speech team. The job is based in San Francisco.

“Laid off from Meta? We are hiring in speech team for Smallest AI in San Francisco!,” he said in the social media post.

How much salary is Smallest AI offering?

The laid-off Meta employees will get a base salary in the range of $200,000 to $600,000 per year, along with flexible equity, Sudarshan Kamath said.

With such attractive base salaries, selected employees are likely to receive more than half a million per annum, making the pay as attractive as bigger tech companies.

What are the criteria?

The Smallest AI founder, however, did mention some requirements to apply to the job

“Looking for - experience with speech evals, speech generation, full duplex speech to speech… Must be - fkin smart and hungry. DM me [sic],” he wrote in the post.

Meta layoffs: What's happening?

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is reportedly laying off around 600 employees from its AI division, Axios reported earlier this week. The company confirmed the Meta layoffs on Wednesday.

The layoffs will affect employees in the ambitious Superintelligence Labs, especially those in Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR unit, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure units.

“By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Meta Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang told employees in a memo, according to a report by Bloomberg.

However, employees of Meta's newly formed TBD Lab group, which includes people who have been recently hired with sky-high salaries, will not be impacted by the layoffs, as per the report.

The job cuts will target teams focused on artificial intelligence products and infrastructure, aiming to boost efficiency without sacrificing work on the company's most ambitious ventures, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

It further said that many of the affected workers could be deployed elsewhere by the company.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reshuffled its AI efforts under Superintelligence Labs in June after senior staff departures and a poor reception for its open-source Llama 4 model.