Anyone who works at Meta or knows someone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing. It’s not a happy place to be, especially considering the company’s seemingly endless layoffs over the past few years. Those layoffs have accelerated as companies have invested billions of dollars in AI.
Now, a new report from Wired says the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of mutiny.
The drama began this week when someone hijacked a profanity-laced livestreamed employee-only presentation and demanded attendees tell a Meta AI senior executive he was a “piece of shit.” One presenter reportedly covered his face with his hands.
As Wired reports, the outburst reflects simmering anger inside the three-month-old department of about 6,500 engineers and product managers tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.
Employees describe being forced into a group without any real choice to join or leave. Many people call themselves “drafters.” What are the assigned tasks? Puzzle generation and coding problems for training AI models. “It’s literally a gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find it soul-crushing,” said another.
A report from Business Insider last month revealed how many employees found out they would be moving to a group. In a surprise email, one of the self-proclaimed draftees later described the process on Reddit as “very random.” An internal presentation reviewed by Business Insider in April found that Meta’s AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding. “For agents to understand how people actually use computers to complete everyday tasks, they need to train their models based on real-world examples,” the post read.
In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that same month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the logic behind drafting Meta’s own engineers rather than external contractors. Alexandr Wang, who took on the role of chief AI officer after selling data labeling startup Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion and led Meta Superintelligence Labs, knows the data labeling world well, and the company believes Meta’s average employee has “significantly higher” intelligence than third-party contractors. If so, it’s better to recruit them.
Meanwhile, more than 1,600 Meta employees across the company signed a petition opposing the program that monitors clicks and keystrokes on AI training data. The mood across the company is so dark that Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox felt he had to deal with a “brutal” environment in a call with employees this week.
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.
According to previous reports, the Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta who was vice president of Reality Labs, the division that burned through $83 billion in the metaverse before Meta shifted to AI. The new organization will report to Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO.
Originally, the structure was such that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.
Zuckerberg reportedly addressed the situation in an internal memo on Friday, acknowledging that the recent changes have “caused concern” and acknowledging that the company has made mistakes that it will address. “Meta’s North Star will be the best place for the world’s most talented people to make an impact,” he added in his note, according to Wired.
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