Indian-origin startup offers jobs to laid-off Meta staff, pay up to ₹5.2 cr

Meta to cut 600 positions from its AI labs; Smallest AI, led by Indian-origin founder Sudarshan Kamath, has offered to hire these affected employees with top salaries of $600,000

After Meta announced that it will lay off 600 employees from its AI division, startups and tech leaders are stepping in to offer new opportunities. One of them is Indian-origin entrepreneur Sudarshan Kamath, founder of Smallest AI. 

The US-based entrepreneur announced on X that his company will hire former Meta employees for its speech team based in San Francisco. 

“Laid off from Meta? We are hiring in speech team for Smallest AI in San Francisco!,” he wrote in the post. Kamath revealed that the jobs come with a base salary ranging from $200,000 (₹1.75 crore) to $600,000 (₹5.26 crore) per year, along with flexible equity options. 

 

“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,” he said.

 

Laid off from Meta?  We are hiring in speech team for Smallest AI in San Francisco!  Comp - 200-600K $ base  Equity - Flexible  Looking for - experience with speech evals, speech generation, full duplex speech to speech  Must be - fkin smart and hungry.  DM me.

— Sudarshan Kamath (@kamath_sutra) October 23, 2025

Job requirements

Applicants must meet specific criteria. Kamath outlined the expectations in his post: “Looking for – experience with speech evals, speech generation, full duplex speech to speech… Must be - fkin smart and hungry. DM me [sic],”

 

What’s happening at Meta?

Meta is cutting around 600 positions in its Superintelligence Labs as it seeks to make its AI division more agile. The layoffs affect teams in Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (Fair), product-focused AI units and AI infrastructure groups, news agency Reuters reported.   

 

  The newly formed TBD Lab, which has a few dozen researchers and engineers working on next-generation foundation models, will not be affected. 

Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang said the move will streamline decision-making and expand the responsibility and impact of each remaining role. The company is also encouraging affected employees to explore other positions within Meta.

 

Meta’s AI ambitions and funding

Recently, Meta secured a $27 billion financing deal with Blue Owl Capital, its largest private capital agreement to date, to support its biggest data centre project. Analysts say the deal allows Meta to pursue its AI goals while shifting much of the cost and risk to external investors. 

Meta reorganised its AI efforts under Superintelligence Labs in June, following senior staff departures and a lukewarm response to its open-source Llama 4 model. CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally led a major hiring push to strengthen the division. 

Superintelligence Labs now includes Meta’s foundations, product, FAIR teams, and the TBD Lab, all focused on developing the company’s next-generation AI models. Meta first began investing in AI in 2013 by establishing the FAIR unit and recruiting Yann LeCun as its chief AI scientist, building a global research network focused on deep learning.