Meta’s Applied AI is Reality Labs 2.0 – Moby BREAKING NEWS
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Emily Dalton Smith, a senior Meta executive who had been with the company since 2015, called it quits, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.
Smith oversaw the company’s restructuring around AI agents. She was promoted back in April to lead product work at Meta, consolidating and improving internal AI tooling as part of their “AI for Work” strategy. That is unfortunately not going to be the case anymore. For CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this is yet another slip-up for Meta, which can’t seem to build a proper foundation for their “AI native” redesign initiative.
Worse for Zuck, it appears everyone who was reassigned into an AI-focused role and avoided being fired less than a month ago (about 8,000 employees) is very, very angry. During a live-streamed, employee-only presentation at Meta with about 1,000 people, someone said an unnamed Meta AI executive was “being the company’s bitch,” according to a recording heard by Wired. That same person insisted on telling the exec, “he’s a piece of shit.”
Three employees told WIRED there’s “widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers” and “the drudge work they allege they have been assigned to improve AI models.” One of the employees claimed “it’s literally a gulag” where you have “zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone,” and “you just have these tasks every week.”
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Not great…not great at all. Given how competitive AI talent is nowadays, Smith’s departure looks less like wanting to try new things and more like a cry for help. Don’t worry, though, because Zuckerberg knows they’ve made “mistakes” and “will almost certainly make more.”
Jabs aside, Meta’s latest reported quarter was a headline beat, with revenue up 19% year over year and ad impressions up 19% year over year, while average price per ad was up 12%.
For now, Meta is going through probably one of their most volatile transformations ever, with investors hoping their Applied AI department doesn’t turn into another Reality Labs.