someone interrupted An employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week was livestreamed and featured an expletive-laden rant about being a “corporate bitch,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. This person then asked those who led the call to write a letter to a specific Meta AI executive and “tell him he’s an asshole.”
Witnesses said one of the presenters covered his face with his hands. (The speakers could not be reached for comment, and the two meeting leaders asked everyone to mute before continuing with their technical talk, but employees commented on the stream about the “spicy” start.)
The incident, which affected thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration within the company’s applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at the Meta Superintelligence Lab. Three current employees told WIRED that there are widespread complaints about how Meta has assembled a force of about 6,500 engineers and product managers, and the tedious work they say they are assigned to improve its AI models. Each spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
“It’s literally a concentration camp,” one employee claims. “Suddenly, you have no purpose in life, you barely interact with anyone, and you just do these tasks every week.”
Another employee said some of the tasks, such as generating puzzles to test how reliably Meta and other companies’ AI models could solve puzzles, were easy compared to software development work they had previously done. But the new project feels boring, and “almost every” employee seems dissatisfied, he said. “Most people find this job soul-crushing,” says a third employee.
Mehta declined to comment for this story.
It’s not just applied AI departments that are contributing to what tensions are boiling over and what employees describe as record-low morale. The company’s AI-focused restructuring, which saw 8,000 employees, or 10 percent of the company, laid off last month, has created extra work and stress in multiple departments, including data center engineering and Instagram, several current and former employees told WIRED.
More than 1,600 employees across the company have signed a petition calling for Meta to halt its recently launched effort to monitor the clicks and keystrokes of U.S. employees 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 certain exemptions.)
In a meeting this week for all Instagram employees, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox referred to a “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by “the craziness of this company” over the past few months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox praised Instagram’s employees for launching the feature and serving its roughly 2 billion users in a situation where it felt like “you’re running a marathon in a hailstorm, your teammates are taking turns, and then we’re recording you.”
“Oh my god,” he said with a chuckle, then repeated himself. “It’s like, what the heck?”
Cox said he and other leaders need to think about how they can “reconnect with the company” and “not get too serious” about the power of AI. “It’s not God or the devil,” he said. “And it’s not as good as you think it is, and it’s not as bad as you think it is. And it changes every week… and it doesn’t know what day of the week it is.”
