For the makers and artists building with AI, Meta’s new unit feels less like a creative lab and more like a factory floor
A recording obtained by WIRED shows a livestreamed, internal Meta meeting derailed by a furious employee who shouted an expletive-laden rant about being treated like “the company’s bitch.” The individual then demanded that the leadership write to a specific executive within the AI division, telling him he was “a piece of shit.”
Witnesses report that one presenter covered their face with their hands during the outburst. While the speaker could not be reached for comment, the session’s two leaders asked everyone to mute before continuing with their technical discussion, though employees on the stream noted the “spicy” opening.
This incident, occurring on a call accessible to thousands of staff, highlights deepening frustration within Meta’s Applied AI (AAI) team. Formed in March to support researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit currently employs around 6,500 engineers and product managers. Three current employees spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, citing a lack of authorisation to discuss the matter publicly. They describe widespread dissatisfaction with how the team was assembled and the menial drudgework they are forced to perform to improve AI models.
“It’s literally the gulag,” one employee claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
Another staff member notes that some assignments—such as generating puzzles to test how reliably Meta and other companies’ AI models solve them—feel trivial compared to their previous software development roles. Despite the lower technical barrier, the work is perceived as soul-crushing. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee states.
Across the wider company, tensions are boiling over. Meta’s recent restructuring, which involved 8,000 employees (roughly 10 per cent of the workforce) being let go last month, has generated extra stress and workloads for remaining staff in divisions including data centre engineering and Instagram.
More than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta halt a recently launched initiative to monitor US staff’s clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. The company has since scaled back the programme, allowing workers to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions.
During an all-hands meeting this week for Instagram, chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by what he called the “insanity of this company” in recent months. He told employees they were launching features and serving around 2 billion users while facing conditions 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 stated he needed to reconnect with the company and stop being “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 organisational changes had caused distress. “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 not to carry out additional mass layoffs this year. He introduced a plan to limit the number of employees per manager, addressing teams like Applied AI where the ratio had deliberately ballooned to 50 to one. He promised increased budgets for team events and a large hackathon next month to help unite the company. By year-end, employees in many locations would have assigned desks again.
“Talented People”
Zuckerberg’s memo addressed the situation in Applied AI directly. He suggested the unit 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 staff in Silicon Valley. This has led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as “draftees.”
The organisation 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 says.
Some employees are being asked to complete 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 work is intended 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 launched 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 personalised 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.”
Key takeaways
- Internal recordings reveal severe morale issues within Meta’s Applied AI unit, where thousands of engineers feel demoralised by menial, repetitive tasks rather than meaningful development work.
- Leadership, including Chris Cox and Mark Zuckerberg, has publicly acknowledged the “insanity” of the recent restructuring and the distress it has caused, promising stability and a return to assigned desks by year-end.
- Despite the turmoil, Meta maintains that Applied AI is a critical, temporary waypoint designed to train models and prepare talented staff for future roles, though employees describe the current selection process as resembling conscription.
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