Someone interrupted a direct, employee-only delivery on Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about “being a corporate bitch,” according to a recording obtained by WIRED. Then the person asked the people leading the call to write in specific Meta AI executive and “tell him that he is a piece of shit.”
One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to the witness. (The speaker could not be reached for comment, and the two conference leaders continued their technical discussion after asking everyone to shut up, although staffers commented on the stream about the “sharp” start.)
The incident, which occurred with an open call for thousands of employees, reflects frustration within the company’s Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers there. Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees tell WIRED there’s widespread dissatisfaction with the way Meta has assembled a team of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the hard work they say they’ve been tasked with improving AI designs for. Each spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
“It’s literally a gulag,” one of the workers claims. “You suddenly have zero purpose in life, you don’t interact with anyone, you have these jobs every week.”
Another employee describes some of the work—generating puzzles to test how well AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they were doing before. But the new projects feel underwhelming and “almost all employees” seem unhappy, they say. “A lot of people find work depressing,” says a third employee.
Meta declined to comment for this story.
Applied AI is not the only division where tensions are rising and contributing to what employees describe as record – low values. The company’s AI-focused reforms, which comprised 10 percent of the company, or 8,000 employees, to be left the past month has produced additional work and stress in several divisions, 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 calling on Meta to end the recently launched initiative. track US workers’ clicks and keystrokes generating AI training data. (The company has scaled back the program slightly, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes with a special apology).
During a meeting this week open to all employees at Instagram, Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the “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 staff for rolling out features and serving nearly 2 billion users while comparing it to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your partner gets replaced and we’re filming you.”
“What is it like to fuck,” he said, drawing a laugh, before repeating himself. “What’s it like, man.”
Cox said he needed to focus on how he and other leaders could “reconnect with the company” and “be less aggressive” about the power of AI. “Not god, not the devil,” he said. “And it’s nowhere near as bad as you think it is, and it’s nowhere near as bad as you think it is. And it changes every week … and it doesn’t know what day of the week it is.”
