Someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about “being the company’s bitch,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and “tell him that he’s a piece of shit.”
One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to a witness. (The speaker could not be reached for comment, and the meeting’s two leaders moved on with their technical talk after asking everyone to mute, though employees commented on the stream about the “spicy” start.)
The incident, which took place on a call open to thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration inside the company’s Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees tell WIRED there is widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the drudgework they allege they have been assigned to improve AI models. Each spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
“It’s literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says.
Meta declined to comment for this story.
Applied AI isn’t the only unit where tensions are boiling over and contributing to what workers describe as record-low morale. The company’s AI-focused restructuring, which included 10 percent of the company, or 8,000 employees, being let go last month has generated extra work and stress throughout several divisions, including data center engineering and Instagram, several current and former employees tell WIRED.
Across the company, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop a recently launched initiative to monitor US employees’ clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data. (The company has scaled back the program slightly, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions).
During a meeting this week open to all employees at Instagram, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by the “insanity of this company” in the past few months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox applauded Instagram employees for launching features and serving around 2 billion users amid what he compared to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we’re recording you.”
“It’s like what the fuck,” he said, drawing laughs, before repeating himself. “It is like what the fuck.”
Cox said he needed to reckon with how he and other leaders could “get in touch with the company again” and “not be overearnest” about the power of AI. “It is neither god, nor is it the devil,” he said. “And it’s nowhere near as good as you think it is, and it is nowhere near as bad as you think it is. And it changes every week … and it doesn’t know what day of the week it is.”
