Meta’s major AI restructure

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Meta’s summer AI hiring spree looks to be complete, and the high-priced recent team is already making big organizational moves.

With a large restructure underway that features dissolving entire teams and a mysterious recent “TBD Labs”, Meta’s quest for superintelligence is starting with major changes from the bottom up.

P.S. Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST with The Rundown’s AI Educator, Nate Grahek. Learn the best way to use AI as an operating system for the long run of labor: RSVP here.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Meta’s massive AI restructure

• Google analyzes Gemini’s environmental footprint

• Automate performance reviews and PIPs

• Musk: Grok 5 has ‘a shot at being true AGI’

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🔀 Meta’s massive AI restructure

The Rundown: Meta is undergoing a large restructure of its AI teams, dissolving its AGI Foundations division and reorganizing operations into 4 units under Alexandr Wang — with the corporate also imposing a hiring freeze after a significant poaching spree.

The small print:

• Wang sent a memo to employees outlining recent teams for research, training, products, and infrastructure, with most division heads reporting on to him.

• The corporate froze hiring across its AI division last week, now requiring Wang’s personal approval for any exceptions to the mandate.

• The AGI Foundations team is being scattered across departments, with Meta also making a ‘TBD Lab’ to explore “omni” models and frontier AI research.

• Wang revealed that Chief Scientist Yann LeCun will now report back to him as well, describing FAIR because the “innovation engine for MSL” in the brand new structure.

Why it matters: Meta’s summer of hiring looks to be officially over, with the main target now turning to constructing a brand new internal structure under the direction of Alexandr Wang. It’s clear that the high-profile recent team wants to maneuver fast — what isn’t clear is how the changes will sit with the broader AI and FAIR teams that now feel lost within the shuffle.

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💡 Where data leaders shape AI’s future

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At EVOLVE25, you may experience:

• A deep dive into trends for data, analytics, and AI with industry analysts

• Customer-led sessions on enabling secure data architectures and analytics

• Hands-on labs on implementing secure AI from development to inference

• Exclusive announcements from Cloudera’s leadership

Register now.

GOOGLE

💧 Google analyzes Gemini’s environmental footprint

The Rundown: Google released a brand new blog detailing the environmental footprint of its Gemini chatbot, claiming the model consumes the equivalent of 5 drops of water per query — though researchers argue it neglected a lot of the actual water usage.

The small print:

• The published findings claim each Gemini text request uses energy equal to watching TV for nine seconds and creates minimal carbon emissions.

• Google said Gemini became 33x more energy efficient and cut carbon output by 44x over the past 12 months, all while the models became more capable.

• The paper found that A Gemini query consumes 0.24 Wh of energy, barely lower than the 0.34 Wh average that Sam Altman revealed for ChatGPT.

• Researchers criticized the study for ignoring water consumed by power plants that generate power for data centers, which represents the vast majority of usage.

Why it matters: While Google’s efforts to offer more transparency around AI’s environmental impact (a key issue for AI detractors) are positive, not everyone agrees with the corporate’s process, which could also be painting an artificially rosy outlook. An industry-wide third-party standard could also be needed to actually understand the total picture.

AI TRAINING

💯 Automate performance reviews and PIPs

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn the best way to connect ChatGPT to your Google Drive knowledge base after which use agent mode to robotically transform messy worker notes into structured performance reviews and improvement plans.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a Google Doc called “Worker Review” with rough notes for every worker (name, role, KPIs, feedback)

2. In ChatGPT, click “+” → “Connected apps” and enable Google Drive access

3. Prompt with system instruction + templates: “Analyze my ‘Worker Review’ doc and create performance reviews and 30/60/90 PIPs using these formats: [paste templates with SMART goals structure]”

4. Enable Agent Mode and prompt: “Update the Worker Review doc with the structured sections for everybody”

5. Schedule monthly automation: “Run third Saturday at 9 AM, update Worker Review doc from latest notes, regenerate reviews and PIPs”

Pro tip: Keep adding rough notes weekly — the scheduled agent consolidates and formats monthly. If the agent cannot edit initially, grant permissions and re-run. This beats manual updates by stopping skipped review cycles.

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XAI AND ELON MUSK

🗣️ Musk: Grok 5 has ‘a shot at being true AGI’

The Rundown: Elon Musk had a busy day of AI commentary on X, revealing recent details about Grok 5, making daring claims about xAI’s ‘Imagine’ generator, and speaking on AI and declining birthrates in a series of posts and replies on the platform.

The small print:

• Musk posted that xAI’s Grok 5 model will begin training in September, saying he believes the model “has a shot at being true AGI”.

• He also said Grok Imagine might be higher than Google’s VEO 3 video generation model “in every respect, with no exceptions”.

• Musk also commented on the declining birthrate, saying AI will actually increase birth rates and might be “programmed that way”.

Why it matters: AGI is a benchmark with no very clear definition, which can make the primary official declaration of it all of the more interesting. With OpenAI being the opposite major lab dancing across the notion of its models officially reaching the bar soon, the term could find yourself being the subject of the subsequent inevitable feud between Altman and Musk.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• ⚙️ Claude Code – Anthropic’s agentic coding tool

• 📊 Copilot in Excel – Bring AI to your spreadsheet formulas

• 🔎 AI Mode – Latest agentic capabilities for search in Google

• 🌎 Game Worlds – Runway’s Beta release for generating text-based games

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Google is expanding access to its AI Mode for conversational search, making it globally available, alongside recent agentic abilities for handling restaurant reservations.

Cohere released Command A Reasoning, a brand new enterprise reasoning model that outperforms similar rivals like gpt-oss and DeepSeek R1 on agentic benchmarks.

Runway introduced Game Worlds in beta, a brand new tool to construct, explore, and play text-based games generated in real-time on the platform.

ByteDance released Seed-OSS, a brand new family of open-source reasoning models with long-context (500k+ tokens) capabilities and robust performance on benchmarks.

Google and the U.S. General Services Administration announced a brand new agreement to supply Gemini to the federal government at just $0.50c per agency to push federal adoption.

Chinese firms are moving away from Nvidia’s H20 and in search of domestic options after being insulted by comments from U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Bill B. in Seattle, WA:

“As a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Fractional CFO for multiple organizations, I’ve integrated AI into my financial review process to deliver faster, sharper insights. By securely uploading client financial statements into ChatGPT and prompting for targeted evaluation and actionable recommendations, I’ve cut review time by as much as 90% — turning what once took days into just hours.”

How are you using AI in your work? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our previous newsletter: Google’s Pixel 10 lineup goes big on AI

• Today’s AI tool guide: Automate performance reviews and PIPs

• RSVP to next workshop @ 4 PM today: Applying AI within the workplace

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown