Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say engineers trapped inside

Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It’s not a happy place, especially in light of the endless layoffs the company has implemented over the past few years — cutbacks that have accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI.

Now, a new report in Wired suggests that the company’s applied AI team is on the verge of mutiny.

The drama began when someone hijacked a live-streamed employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that the audience tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was a “piece of shit.” One of the broadcasters reportedly covered their faces with their hands.

The outbursts, Wired reports, reflect simmering anger within the three-month-old unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.

Employees describe being forced into the group without any real choice: join or withdraw. Many call themselves “recruits.” Their assigned work? Create puzzles and programming problems to train AI models. “It’s literally a gulag,” one employee told Wired. Another said: “Most people find work soul-crushing.”

Meanwhile, more than 1,600 Meta employees across the company have signed a petition protesting software that monitors their clicks and keystrokes to obtain AI training data. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, even described the current environment as “brutal” 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, who was previously vice president of Meta’s Reality Labs division, a division that spent $83 billion on Metaverse before Meta moved into AI. The new organization reports to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.

Originally, it was organized so that up to 50 employees reported to a single manager.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the situation in an internal memo on Friday, acknowledging that the recent changes have “caused distress” and admitting that the company has made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his note that “the Meta North Star is the best place for the world’s most talented people to make an impact.”