Meta AI Unit Faces Revolt as Engineers Call Forced Transfers and Data-Labeling Work 'The Gulag'

Meta's months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: it is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years -- cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI. Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company's Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt. The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was "a piece of sh_t." One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands. That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company's AI research ambitions. Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves "draftees." Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told Wired. "Most people find the work soul-crushing," said another. Meanwhile, more than 1,600 Meta employees across the company have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. Even Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, called the current environment "brutal" in a call with employees this week. TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment. The Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, who was previously a vice president in Meta's Reality Labs division, according to earlier reports. The new organization reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Originally, it was structured in such a way that up to 50 employees reported to one manager. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the situation in an internal memo Friday, acknowledging that recent changes had "caused distress" and admitting the company had made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his memo that "Meta's north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact."

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious'

Meta did an "atrocious" job of rolling out a new artificial intelligence division and will aim to "rekindle" a more cheerful internal culture through better communication, career growth, and even snacks, a top executive told employees on Monday in an internal post seen by WIRED. The comments made by Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, follow reporting by WIRED last week that revealed widespread dissatisfaction within the Applied AI engineering unit. Meta formed the division of about 6,500 engineers and product managers in March to work on projects aimed at improving the company's generative AI models. But what workers described as the menial nature of the work prompted one to describe it as "a gulag." "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued, that you will grow and advance your career, and that this will be a place where you can actually have an impact," Bosworth wrote. "We shook up the management structure that was providing you stability while rapid changes in strategy, including the boom/bust cycle of hiring, left entire teams in the lurch." Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The unrest inside the AI team is part of a broader downward swing in morale at Meta in the wake of mass layoffs, worker surveillance, and other concerns among employees. In recent days, several executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have posted internal messages acknowledging employees' feelings and vowing to make changes to address them. In the lengthy memo, Bosworth, long seen as a Zuckerberg loyalist, said that employees would receive more personalized attention going forward. Meta plans to cap managers at about 20 direct reports each, he wrote, and try to limit the number of times employees switch to new managers as part of restructurings. He also said Meta leadership would commit to better explaining the rationale behind strategy shifts and organizational changes. Managers would be focused primarily on managing and secondarily on independent work, and workers would have access to "AI coaching" tools should they decide to use them. Responding to a comment on his memo about the Applied AI team, Bosworth wrote, "We obviously did an atrocious job explaining the vision, giving people a clear picture of how we would support them and their careers in the shift, and painting a picture of how it would change over time." In a separate post from late last Friday seen by WIRED, Maher Saba, a vice president leading the Applied AI team, told employees who were forced to join that they would be now allowed to take other roles within Meta if they are able to secure them. "Moving forward, we are returning to business as usual and giving people the agency to apply to roles that interest them," Saba wrote. Bosworth emphasized that Meta doesn't subscribe to the belief that AI will fully replace AI workers. However, he said, "We should heed the saying, 'AI won't take your job but someone who knows AI might.'" He added that there would be "tough trade-offs for a while" around the amount of compute available to different teams to make use of AI tools. "We will do our best to be transparent and invest responsibly to alleviate bottlenecks," he wrote, while also encouraging employees to escalate any issues. And, in an attempt to boost morale, Bosworth vowed to make the company a "fun and enjoyable" place to work. Meta will be "improving microkitchens," which are break areas within offices with snacks and drinks, and increasing travel budgets as well as spending on social events, so that employees can spend time together in person. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

Meta Employees Absolutely Hate Zuckerberg's Plan for a Companywide AI Hackathon

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's internal announcement on Friday about a "large" companywide AI hackathon next month quickly sparked frustration and disbelief among employees. In internal messages seen by WIRED, some workers wrote that added responsibilities in the wake of recent mass layoffs at the tech giant had left them with little time to join such ancillary activities. Others said they felt discouraged from participating because of what they viewed as low morale and declining trust in management across the company. "I'm literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team," one employee wrote on Friday. "I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so." In a post shared to Meta's roughly 70,000 employees, Zuckerberg framed the hackathon as a way for staff to build camaraderie at a time of widespread internal unrest. Ime Archibong, a vice president of product management at Meta, later shared additional details about the event, which he said would take place from July 14 to July 16 and focus "exclusively on AI Innovation." Archibong's post drew swift pushback from several employees, who responded with angry messages and sarcastic memes. "I'm not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore," one employee wrote in a comment that drew more than 200 thumbs-up and heart reactions. "People are being asked to cover more work with less support while their colleagues get laid off, while also trying to avoid the risk of causing SEV1s [serious technical errors] with incautious AI use." The same employee alleged that hackathon efforts would not count toward performance evaluations, fueling frustration among the workers about the prospect of setting aside other projects to participate. Dozens of people also reacted with laughs and thumbs-up to a meme inspired by the comedy film We're the Millers, stating, "You all have the time for a hackathon?" "I honestly don't have the time to focus on this, and I'm expected to be 100% devoted" to regular work, another employee wrote. "I've participated in previous hackathons but this no longer feels like an option alongside pod sprints in my corner of the company." A third staffer called out what they described as "a disappointing change in culture" because "I don't believe there is sufficient feeling of safety to spend time on hackathon innovations." Meta declined to comment for this story. Got a Tip?Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal Peard33.24 and at Mzeff.88. Meta has long hosted internal hackathons, but two sources tell WIRED this is the first companywide one to take place since 8,000 people were laid off last month. A Meta software engineering veteran responded to some of the employee complaints by saying that everyone is encouraged to participate. But the message still didn't quite land. "Every org I know has super aggressive goals, with efficiency gains expected and significantly less staffing," an employee commented back. "There's less time for focusing on other axis." The hackathon was one of several initiatives Zuckerberg laid out on Friday to reenergize his workforce and address internal criticism about the recent layoffs and other concerns. He said budgets for team offsites would increase and that the concept of hot desking, or workers only in the office part of the time having to share desks, would be done away with in some offices. Last year, some workers banded together to survey colleagues about the removal of their desks and the chaos and loss productivity they believe it caused, according to a person familiar with the efforts who sought anonymity to describe sensitive discussions. The group urged management to return to every employee having their own space. The layoffs appear to have opened up room, while leaving less time to hack.

'Tell Him He's a Piece of Shit': Meta's New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

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. Got a Tip?Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporters securely on Signal at peard33.24 and zoeschiffer.87. 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." In an internal memo on Friday seen by WIRED, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that recent organizational changes had caused distress across Meta. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," he wrote. "As we navigate this period, I'm also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible." Zuckerberg reiterated a vow to not carry out additional mass layoffs this year. He introduced a plan to limit the number of employees per manager, which on some teams, such as Applied AI, had deliberately ballooned to a ratio of 50 to one. Budgets for team events would increase, he said, and a large hackathon planned for next month could also help bring the company together. By the end of the year, employees in many locations would have assigned desks again, the CEO wrote. "Talented People" Zuckerberg's memo also addressed the allegedly dismal situation in Applied AI directly, referring to the unit by its acronym. He suggested the team was a waypoint, not a destination. "Work like AAI is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well," he wrote. Engineers selected for the unit have no choice but to join or leave the company, an unusual requirement for highly valued technical employees in Silicon Valley. That's led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as "draftees." The organization has grown in batches since early April. "It's crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in," an early member of Applied AI says. Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Some of the work is meant to help develop AI agents that generate software or other outputs. One worker describes the assignment as "mechanical and not creative" and certainly "not using their full skillset and knowledge." They feel they were hired to develop social media apps for billions of people, but now find themselves assembling data for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips. Meta released pioneering open-weights AI models three years ago, but has had mixed results with subsequent releases. Applied AI is among several expensive initiatives Zuckerberg has spun up in hopes that the company can better compete in the growing market for AI services. Zuckerberg noted in his memo that, unlike some other AI labs, "automating work" was not Meta's primary focus. "The products we'll build will range from much more personalized Instagram and Facebook experiences and glasses that help you throughout the day to better tools for small businesses to thrive and create jobs, and personal superintelligence agents that understand your goals and work 24/7 on your behalf to help in the ways you want," he wrote. To get there, he said, "Meta's north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact."

Inside the revolt at Meta's Applied AI unit

An employee hijacked a company-wide livestream to insult an executive. It was the loudest sign yet that Applied AI, the 6,500-person unit built to power Mark Zuckerberg's most expensive AI bet, has become what staff call "the gulag". It takes a particular kind of dysfunction for an employee to hijack a company-wide livestream and demand the hosts pass a message to a senior executive: that he is, in not so many words, garbage. That happened inside Meta this month. According to a recording heard by WIRED, the outburst, on a call open to thousands of staff, was not really about one executive. It was the loudest signal yet of how badly things have soured inside Applied AI, the roughly 6,500-person unit Mark Zuckerberg built in March to power his most expensive bet in artificial intelligence. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told WIRED. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden." The $14.3bn bet, and the machinery behind it That bet has a name: Alexandr Wang. Last summer, Meta paid $14.3bn for a 49 per cent stake in Wang's data-labelling startup, Scale AI, and installed the young founder as its chief AI officer, leading the new Meta Superintelligence Labs. Applied AI is the machinery meant to turn his models from promising into competitive with Claude and ChatGPT. The problem is what that machinery actually does. Applied AI is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year Meta veteran and former Reality Labs vice-president, reporting up to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. As The Pragmatic Engineer's Gergely Orosz documented in a detailed account this week, between 30 and 50 per cent of engineers on core product, infrastructure and security teams were reassigned to an internal group focused on data labelling and reinforcement learning from human feedback, the human-in-the-loop grunt work that improves AI models. Around 6,500 people now sit in it; by his estimate, one in every five or six of Meta's engineers may be labelling data full time. For most of Meta's history, engineers chose their own teams. Now, per an internal memo from the unit's chief seen by Reuters, the transfers were not optional. The people moved against their will began calling themselves draftees. Surveillance, layoffs and tokenmaxxing None of this happened in a vacuum. In May, Meta cut about 8,000 jobs, a tenth of its workforce, days after shifting thousands more onto AI teams. Around the same time, staff protested a system that tracks their keystrokes and mouse clicks to harvest AI training data, with no opt-out; more than 1,600 signed a petition, and one office nicknamed it the "Employee Data Extraction Factory". After the backlash, Reuters reported on 2 June that Meta had begun letting staff pause the tracking for up to 30 minutes at a time and request exemptions. Then there were the incentives. Engineers learned that token usage would be weighed in performance reviews, so they began burning tokens for the sake of it, a status game the industry came to call tokenmaxxing. Per The Information, Meta staff ran through 60.2 trillion AI tokens in 30 days, which at list prices would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The perverse result, Orosz argues: an outage caused by sloppy AI-generated code might not get you fired, but writing code by hand could. The bill comes due That culture has a cost. On 30 May, Meta suffered what Orosz calls the most embarrassing outage in its history: a wave of Instagram account takeovers, including high-profile accounts, after its support AI could reportedly be tricked into sending a password-reset code to an attacker's email. Meta's security teams, gutted by reassignments, were caught flat-footed; its chief information security officer departed days later. Meta has separately had to freeze some AI data work after a breach put training secrets at risk. Even leadership has stopped pretending. CTO Andrew Bosworth told staff the AI reorg was "atrocious" and that morale was near the worst he had seen in 20 years, comparable to Cambridge Analytica. Chief product officer Chris Cox described the "insanity of this company" and likened the period to "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm", before urging a reality check on the technology itself: AI, he said, "is neither god, nor is it the devil". Now Zuckerberg is trying to steady the ship. In a Friday memo he conceded the changes had "caused distress" and that "we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more". He has promised no further company-wide layoffs for the rest of 2026, moved to cap a manager-to-report ratio that had ballooned towards 50-to-one on teams such as Applied AI, raised budgets for team events, and floated a company-wide AI hackathon, an idea employees openly hated. Whether that is enough to stop the exodus is another question: Orosz reports a surge of Meta engineers signing up to interview-prep services since May. The cautionary tale The strangest part is that the business is booming. Meta posted $56.3bn in first-quarter revenue, up 33 per cent, with its AI-powered ad-creation tools doubling to eight million advertisers; on current trends it is on course to overtake Google as the world's largest advertising business. Its latest in-house model landed to a muted response, yet Zuckerberg decided that building a coding AI mattered more than keeping his best engineers, or running Instagram and Facebook reliably. There is a case that the market, and the morale story, are missing the point. As Forbes contributor Jon Markman argues, the $14.3bn did not buy a model at all; it bought a near-half stake in Scale AI, the supplier of the high-quality training data and reinforcement-learning environments that every frontier lab is now scrambling for. Meta gave Llama away for free precisely because Zuckerberg bet that models would commoditise and that the durable value would sit in the data and the distribution, the same logic that already turns Meta's behavioural data into industry-leading ad returns. By that reading, grading Meta on whether its new model tops a benchmark is grading the wrong exam. It is a genuine counterweight, even if it does nothing to soften the human cost inside the engineering org, or explain why a company posting record profits chose to gut the teams that produce them. Meta's stock is down around 18 per cent over the past year, the weakest of the megacaps, as investors weigh that very question. It is a pattern others see spreading. Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp, warns that entire companies are operating under a kind of "AI psychosis", shipping fast on the assumption that agents will clean up the mess, the way Meta's engineers dropped their quality bar and then watched high-profile accounts get hacked. Meta's story is the most extreme version so far: a profitable giant that, in the words of one of its own product chiefs, turned its prized engineering culture into collateral damage. The talent it is shedding, Orosz notes, will be someone else's gain.

Meta's Super Expensive New AI Team Is Already a Complete Catastrophe

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive "Superintelligence" unit. But those who've survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren't exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta's 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom. Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta's AI models, is "soul-crushing." "It's literally the gulag," one employee told Wired. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." One employee-only presentation was reportedly interrupted by a disillusioned worker, who accused a Meta AI executive of "being the company's b****," encouraging others to write him and "tell him that he's a piece of s***." Zooming out, Meta's AI-focused restructuring has seen thousands of employees sacked, forcing those who remain to take on additional workloads. One employee who was laid off was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents almost immediately, with their colleagues' cries to higher ups falling on deaf ears. A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that's then fed to train AI. "The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work, and our role is to direct, review and help them improve," Meta's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff in an April memo obtained by Reuters. Meta is also furiously trying to contain a different surveillance-related PR crisis after Wired reported last week that Meta had discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its smart glasses. In short, Meta's leadership has plenty of fires to contain as the AI race heats up among its competitors. Zuckerberg has caught onto the "record-low morale," arguing in a Friday memo that "we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more." "As we navigate this period, I'm also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible," he added. Zuckerberg promised last month that the mass firings would cease for at least seven more months. Whether his attempts to rein in the chaos will be able to breathe life into a catastrophic AI department is dubious at best. In his memo last week, Zuckerberg specifically addressed morale inside his company's Applied AI team, calling the grunt work "critical to advancing our models." However, given the well-established reputation of their employer, netizens struggled to conjure up much sympathy for the Applied AI employees. Their argument: the workers knew what they had signed up for. "Zuckerberg is only able to build his nation-consuming spyware because they willingly take his money," one user commented on Wired's reporting. "Now all of the sudden they're persecuted because they're being mildly inconvenienced while constructing his slop empire? Give me a break." "So these employees were fine with creating soul crushing AI that would be forced on other workers at other companies or that would take their jobs," another user wrote, "as long as they felt the work was challenging in the process?"

Meta employees are revolting against its AI rules and it's a lesson for us all

Employee frustration is spilling into public view as Meta doubles down on AI Meta's aggressive push into artificial intelligence is facing growing resistance from an unexpected group: its own employees. According to a recent report from WIRED, frustration inside Meta has reached a boiling point following a series of AI-related restructuring efforts, layoffs, and workplace policies. The tensions became public this week when an employee interrupted a company-wide livestream with an expletive-filled rant directed at Meta's AI leadership, shocking thousands of colleagues watching the presentation. Recommended Videos The incident may sound like an isolated outburst, but employees say it reflects a much broader problem inside the company. Over the past several months, Meta has reorganized large parts of its workforce around artificial intelligence, creating new teams tasked with helping improve and evaluate AI models. The company has simultaneously invested heavily in its AI ambitions while restructuring existing divisions and reducing headcount. One of the most controversial initiatives has been the creation of Applied AI, a unit reportedly comprising around 6,500 engineers and product managers. Employees interviewed by WIRED described the work as repetitive and disconnected from the jobs they were originally hired to do. Some reportedly spend their time creating coding challenges and test cases used to train and evaluate AI systems rather than building products directly used by customers. AI ambition is colliding with employee morale The dissatisfaction extends beyond a single team. According to the report, Meta's recent AI-focused restructuring coincided with layoffs affecting roughly 10% of the workforce, or around 8,000 employees. Workers across multiple divisions reportedly describe morale as being at historic lows as teams adapt to new priorities and additional workloads. Another flashpoint has been Meta's effort to collect employee activity data for AI training purposes. More than 1,600 employees reportedly signed a petition opposing a program designed to monitor clicks and keystrokes on company devices. Following the backlash, Meta adjusted the initiative by allowing workers to pause data collection temporarily and request exemptions in certain cases. Even senior executives have acknowledged the turmoil. During an internal meeting, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox reportedly described the recent environment as "difficult" and "brutal," while comparing the company's situation to running a marathon during a hailstorm. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also admitted in an internal memo that the company had made mistakes during the restructuring process and promised greater stability moving forward. The situation highlights a broader AI challenge The events unfolding at Meta illustrate a growing challenge facing the technology industry. As companies race to build more advanced AI systems, many are asking employees to change roles, learn new skills, and contribute to projects that may feel disconnected from their original expertise. While executives often focus on technological progress, workers can experience these shifts very differently. Meta argues that its AI investments are necessary to build future products, including smarter social media experiences, AI assistants, and next-generation wearable devices. Zuckerberg has repeatedly described AI as central to the company's long-term strategy. However, the employee backlash serves as a reminder that successful AI adoption is not only about technology. It also depends on trust, transparency, and ensuring workers understand how they fit into a rapidly changing future. For Meta, the challenge now is not just building better AI models. It is convincing its own employees that they want to help build them.

From Dream Job to 'the Gulag': Inside the Meta Staff Revolt Over Zuckerberg's Brutal AI Push

Welcome to The House of Zuckerberg -- which employees are now more inclined to call it Suckerland. Reports have proliferated in the past days detailing Meta staff teetering between utter dismay and furious protest at how awful their jobs, work, and lives have become. Those are being generated by a company atmosphere described as dismal, and almost entirely blamed on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's prioritization of developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools over any other consideration. That corporate shift has led to over 25,000 layoffs since 2022 -- and another 8,000 just this month -- to free up money for recruiting crack AI engineers and executives to lead its specialized unit to produce the tech. Those cuts, and the spiking pressures on survivors to crank out AI tools faster, have left a lot of employees who've retained their jobs amid the carnage wishing they hadn't. Those who felt differently may have recently changed their minds, after Zuckerberg announced Meta would be monitoring staff work as a means of training task automating applications -- which at some point will presumably take over the entire positions they've learned from. "It's literally the gulag," one employee in Meta's elite Applied AI unit told Wired in its recent report on spreading staff dissent." You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Perhaps just as bad, although recruitment to Applied AI featured even more lavish salaries than the old Facebook days -- with Zuckerberg paying some executives poached from rivals hundreds of millions of dollars -- the actual work performed in it is described as bleak. Among the regular tasks: devising puzzles and coding problems used to train AI models

Toxic mix of chaos and drudgery turns Meta's AI unit into a real-world hell: 'Soul-crushing'

A new unit at Meta devoted to artificial intelligence is turning into real-world hell for employees, according to a new report. At a live-streamed meeting earlier this month reported by Wired, a disgruntled person interrupted speakers to go on an expletive-filled tirade about "being the company's b -- h," raving that an unnamed Meta AI exec should be told, "he's a piece of s-t." One of the presenters reportedly covered their face with their hands before the meeting's leaders told everyone to hit the mute button, though rank-and-file workers continued to make comments about it, Wired reported. The incident highlights growing frustration inside Meta's Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs - and comes as anxiety has lingered after a brutal round of layoffs targeting 8,000 employees last month. Wired reported widespread dissatisfaction with how Mark Zuckerberg's Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers, finding employees are fed up with the drudge work they say is required of them to improve AI models. "It's literally the gulag," an unnamed worker told Wired. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." The tasks reportedly include creating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta and others' AI models. Meta workers called the work easy compared to the software development they previously did, but complained that it's menial and say "almost all" employees seem unhappy. "Most people find the work soul-crushing," a second employee was quoted as saying. Another worker called their job "mechanical and not creative," complaining they're "not using their full skill set and knowledge." Instead of developing social media apps for billions of people, they've found themselves slogging through data to prepare it for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips. In another sign of employee discontent, more than 1,600 workers reportedly signed a petition calling on Meta stop a recent initiative to monitor US employees' keyboard and mouse activity in order to generate AI training data. Meta chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the "difficult" and "brutal" conditions created by the "insanity of this company" during a recent meeting for Instagram employees, according to Wired. He cheered workers' efforts, which 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 f-k," he reportedly said twice, drawing snickers. Cox said he and other leaders needed to "get in touch with the company again" and "not be overearnest" about the power of AI, according to Wired. "It is neither god, nor is it the devil," he was quoted as saying. "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." Zuckerberg reportedly acknowledged that recent organizational changes had ruffled feathers across the company. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," he wrote in an internal memo this month, according to Wired. "As we navigate this period, I'm also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible." He reportedly said he would not carry out additional mass layoffs this year, adding he would limit the number of employees per manager. On teams including Applied AI, there were cases of one manager overseeing 50 workers. Zuckerberg also sought to foster goodwill by saying he would increase budgets for team events. His memo addressed the situation at the Applied AI team, using the division's acronym, too. "Work like [Applied AI] is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well," he wrote, according to Wired. Meta declined to comment to Wired and did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment.

Meta CTO says AI reorganisation was mishandled, admits employees lost trust

However, he warned employees that AI skills would become important Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth has reportedly admitted that the company handled a major reorganisation of its AI teams poorly. In an internal message to employees, seen by Wired, Bosworth said Meta did not properly explain the changes when it created its Applied AI division earlier this year. The unit, which includes around 6,500 engineers and product managers, was formed to work on projects related to the company's generative AI models. "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued, that you will grow and advance your career, and that this will be a place where you can actually have an impact," Bosworth wrote. "We shook up the management structure that was providing you stability while rapid changes in strategy, including the boom/bust cycle of hiring, left entire teams in the lurch." Also read: Anthropic hit with lawsuit over how it marketed Claude Max subscriptions: Here is what happened He also admitted that the company failed to communicate its plans clearly. Responding to a comment on his memo about the Applied AI team, Bosworth said, "We obviously did an atrocious job explaining the vision, giving people a clear picture of how we would support them and their careers in the shift, and painting a picture of how it would change over time." Meta plans to make several changes. Bosworth said managers will have fewer direct reports, with a target of around 20 employees per manager. The company will also try to reduce the number of times workers are moved under different managers during reorganisations. Also read: Elon Musk loses again to OpenAI as court throws out xAI trade secrets case Bosworth also rejected the idea that AI would fully replace workers. However, he warned employees that AI skills would become important. "We should heed the saying, 'AI won't take your job but someone who knows AI might.'" In a separate internal message, Applied AI leader Maher Saba told employees who had been moved into the division that they are free to apply for other roles within Meta if they found positions that interested them.