{"id":735907,"date":"2026-06-14T11:41:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T11:41:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/735907\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T11:41:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T11:41:19","slug":"metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/735907\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> layoffs<\/a> the company has executed<\/a> over the last few years<\/a> \u2014 cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI.<\/p>\n

Now, a new report<\/a> in Wired suggests the company\u2019s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ca piece of sh*t.\u201d One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s AI research ambitions.<\/p>\n

A report last month<\/a> in Business Insider shed light on how many employees originally learned they\u2019d be moved into the group \u2014 through a surprise email, a process that one self-described draftee described later on Reddit as \u201cquite random<\/a>.\u201d According to an internal announcement reviewed by BI, the reason they were enlisted is that Meta\u2019s AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding. \u201cFor agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples,\u201d the announcement read.<\/p>\n

In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his reasoning for drafting employees rather than outside contractors. Alexandr Wang \u2014 who sold his data-labeling startup Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion before taking the role of chief AI officer and heading up Meta Superintelligence Labs \u2014 knows the data-labeling world well, Zuckerberg said. And candidly, the average Meta employee has \u201csignificantly higher\u201d intelligence than third-party contractors, he added, making them the better choice.<\/p>\n

Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves \u201cdraftees.\u201d Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. \u201cIt\u2019s literally the gulag,\u201d one employee told Wired. \u201cMost people find the work soul-crushing,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the Applied AI group where morale is lousy. More than 1,600 Meta employees company-wide have reportedly signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. The mood across the company is dark enough that Meta\u2019s chief product officer, Chris Cox, felt compelled to address the \u201cbrutal\u201d environment on a call with employees this week, said Wired.<\/p>\n

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.<\/p>\n

According to earlier reports, the Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta who was previously a vice president in its Reality Labs division, the division that burned through $83 billion<\/a> on the metaverse before Meta moved on to AI. The new organization reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.<\/p>\n

Originally, the unit was structured in such a way that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the broader situation in an internal memo Friday, acknowledging that recent changes had \u201ccaused distress\u201d and admitting the company had made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his memo that \u201cMeta\u2019s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735908,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,1333,105],"class_list":["post-735907","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-meta","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735907","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=735907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}