Someone interrupted A A live-streamed employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week included a profanity-laced outburst about “being a company whore,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. The interviewer then asked the interviewers to write to a specific Meta AI executive and “tell him he’s a piece of crap.”
According to the witness, one of the presenters covered his face with his hands. (The speaker could not be reached for comment, and the two meeting leaders continued the technical conversation after asking everyone to mute, although staff commented on the broadcast about the “savory” start.)
The incident, which occurred during a call open to thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration within the company’s Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of artificial intelligence researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees tell WIRED that there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way Meta has assembled a team of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the tough work they believe they have been given to improve its artificial intelligence models. Each spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
“It’s literally a gulag,” says one employee. “Suddenly you have no purpose in life, you barely have any contact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”
Another employee describes some of the tasks – creating puzzles to see how tough AI models from Meta and others can solve them – as basic compared to his previous software development work. But the recent designs seem servile and “almost all” workers seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find this job soul-crushing,” says a third employee.
Meta declined to comment for this story.
Applied artificial intelligence is not the only unit where tensions are rising and contributing to what employees describe as record low morale. The company’s AI-driven restructuring, which included laying off 10 percent of the company, or 8,000 employees, last month generated additional work and stress in several departments, including data center engineering and Instagram, several current and former employees tell WIRED.
Across the company, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop its recently launched initiative to monitor the clicks and keystrokes of U.S. employees to generate AI training data. (The company has slightly scaled back the program, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request certain time off.)
During a meeting this week open to all Instagram employees, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox referred to the “challenging” and “brutal” environment created by “the madness of this company” over the past few months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox praised Instagram employees for enabling the feature and serving its approximately 2 billion users in what he likened to “running a marathon in the middle of a hail storm and then, for example, your teammate gets replaced and then we record you.”
“That’s some damn stuff,” he said, drawing laughter before repeating himself. “That’s what the hell.”
Cox said he needs to consider how he and other leaders can “reconnect with the company” and “not be overhyped about the power of AI.” “It is neither god nor devil,” he said. “And it’s not as good as you think, or half as bad as you think. And it changes every week… and it doesn’t know what day of the week it is.”