{"id":681553,"date":"2026-05-19T20:53:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:53:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/681553\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T20:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T20:53:08","slug":"meta-is-rapidly-reorganizing-its-workers-jobs-around-ai-transfers-arent-optional-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/681553\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers\u2019 jobs around AI: \u2018Transfers aren\u2019t optional\u2019 | Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Meta<\/a> races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence<\/a>, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams<\/a>, and it\u2019s radically changing some employees\u2019 jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that\u2019s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.<\/p>\n

Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been \u201cselected\u201d for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers<\/a> on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI \u2013 at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: \u201cTransfers aren\u2019t optional.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOur work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,\u201d wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta<\/a>, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. \u201cThe pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Meta employee referenced last month\u2019s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose\u2019s announcement, writing: \u201cDoes \u2018selected\u2019 imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?\u201d<\/p>\n

A Meta spokesperson confirmed the shift and said the teams are about 25 people each.<\/p>\n

Meta is also taking away some managers\u2019 direct reports and shifting these managers into roles where they\u2019re expected to produce work more than oversee others \u2013 a shift that\u2019s under way throughout Silicon Valley as companies embrace AI tools and try to flatten their management structures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This rapid-fire reorganization is stirring up discontent within Meta during an already volatile era<\/a>. \u201cThe new orgs showcase a shift in top level management strategy towards micro-authoritarianism,\u201d said a Meta engineer, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. Instead of empowering employees, it feels like Meta\u2019s attitude has shifted to, \u201c\u2018No, we tell you what to do, and command and order is the way forward,\u2019\u201d this employee told the Guardian.<\/p>\n

Meta is expected to lay off approximately 10% of its workforce<\/a> this week \u2013 despite record earnings<\/a> during the first three months of 2026. Workers are also riled up over the company\u2019s plans to surveil them extensively at work and use the data it collects to train AI models. The company has begun rolling out a monitoring tool called Model Capability Initiative<\/a> (MCI), which tracks workers\u2019 mouse movements, keystrokes, every time they open and close their laptop, and anything they copy and paste \u2013 and feed it into an AI model as training data.<\/p>\n

A Meta spokesperson told the Guardian: \u201cIf we\u2019re building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them \u2013 things like mouse movements, clicking buttons and navigating dropdown menus. To help, we\u2019re launching an internal tool that will capture these kinds of inputs on certain applications to help us train our models. There are safeguards in place to protect sensitive content, and the data is not used for any other purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s employees don\u2019t seem to be reassured by this.<\/p>\n

Historically, Meta was known for its generous perks<\/a> and flexibility: high pay and free meals, and often giving workers the autonomy to choose what they worked on. But since Meta\u2019s first-ever layoffs in 2022, the company\u2019s internal culture has shifted. The Meta engineer interviewed by the Guardian said the company has been whittling away perks over time. \u201cSmall acts foreshadowed what was to come: rolling layoffs with months of uncertainty before confirmation, MCI, drafting \u2026 It feels like they are trying to defeat our spirit by landing multiple attacks at once.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this has been making Meta workers feel disillusioned at work. Last week, a group of employees began attempting to organize their colleagues to push back against Meta\u2019s AI plans. They posted flyers across at least five US Meta offices that asked questions like \u201cWant Meta to stop collecting employee data to feed to their AI models?\u201d and asked employees to sign a petition<\/a> demanding that the company \u201cnot collect employee \u2018computer-use\u2019 data for the purposes of training AI models\u201d.<\/p>\n

So far, more than 500 Meta employees have signed the petition, a Meta data scientist who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions told the Guardian. \u201cMeta has an extreme culture of fear,\u201d they said, adding that the company typically quashes employee dissent. But this is the \u201cfirst time\u201d Meta workers have rallied against the company in more than a year.<\/p>\n

In addition to this petition, a group of Meta workers in the UK are organizing to form a union with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW).<\/p>\n

These latest developments mark a notable shift in the mood at the world\u2019s largest social media company. In the past, Meta employees have been outspoken and criticized management \u2013 including an employee-organized virtual walkout<\/a> in 2020 over Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s handling of Donald Trump\u2019s posts encouraging violence against Black protesters. But since 2022, when layoffs began, workers have mostly been quiet.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s, Google\u2019s and Anthropic\u2019s consumer AI products are already in the lead, so Meta has been playing catch-up in the AI race. In January, Zuckerberg said in an earnings call that the company will spend up to $135bn on AI infrastructure this year \u201cto train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world\u201d. Last month, Meta launched its AI model, Muse Spark, the first one to have come out of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Achieving these AI ambitions will require not just infrastructure, but also engineers \u2013 which means the company is treading a fine line as its layoffs and internal reorganizations affect employee morale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-681553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}