Everyone who works at Meta—or knows someone who does—will tell you the same thing: it’s an unhappy workplace, especially amid the seemingly endless wave of layoffs the company has carried out over the past few years. Those cuts have only intensified as Meta pours billions of dollars into AI. Now, a new Wired report claims the company’s Applied AI team is on the brink of open revolt. The turmoil began this week when an unidentified person hijacked a livestreamed, employees-only presentation with a profanity-filled tirade, insisting that the audience tell a senior Meta AI executive he was “a piece of shit.” One presenter reportedly buried their face in their hands. According to Wired, the outburst reflects growing anger within the three-month-old division of about 6,500 engineers and product managers, who were assembled to support the company’s AI research goals. A Business Insider report last month revealed that many staffers first learned of their transfer via a surprise email—a process one self-described draftee later called “quite random” on Reddit. According to an internal memo seen by BI, the firm was brought in because Meta’s AI models still couldn’t match human performance on technical tasks such as coding. The announcement stated that “to enable agents to comprehend how individuals truly perform routine computer-based tasks, our models must be trained on authentic examples.” That same month, a leaked audio from an internal meeting revealed CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining why the company was recruiting its own employees instead of hiring external contractors. Alexandr Wang, who sold his data-labeling startup Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion before becoming chief AI officer and leading Meta Superintelligence Labs, has deep expertise in the data-labeling space, Zuckerberg said. And candidly, he added, the average Meta employee is “significantly more intelligent” than third-party contractors, making them the superior option. Employees say they are forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. A lot of people refer to themselves as “draftees.” Their designated tasks?
Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it
- by stefan