Someone interrupted a live-streamed Meta meeting earlier this month to scream, on the record, that a company executive is "a piece of s--t" and that employees are being treated like "the company's b--h." One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands. This is the vibe inside Meta's new AI division, and it gets considerably worse from there.
What Is the Applied AI Team and Why Are 6,500 People Already Miserable
Meta created its Applied AI unit in March to support the researchers working at Meta Superintelligence Labs. In theory, it sounds like a prestigious assignment at the center of the hottest technology on Earth. In practice, Wired reports it has become something closer to a white-collar labor camp staffed by engineers who used to build products for billions of people.
The unit absorbed roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers. Their primary job, according to Wired, is doing things like creating puzzles to test the reliability of AI models and slogging through data to prepare it for AI scientists to feed into computer chips. Work that the employees themselves describe as easy, but also mechanical, purposeless, and demeaning.
"It's literally the gulag," one worker told Wired. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another said, simply, that "most people find the work soul-crushing." A third complained about being unable to use their "full skill set and knowledge." The employees are not subtle about how they feel.
The Meeting Where Someone Just Lost It Completely
The live-streamed blowup Wired reported is the kind of thing that happens when a company moves fast enough to break its own workforce. A disgruntled employee hijacked the meeting to deliver a profanity-laden monologue about being degraded and to personally denounce an unnamed Meta AI executive by name.
The presenter who covered their face deserves a raise, frankly, because that is the only sane response to watching your company's internal chaos broadcast in real time to thousands of colleagues. Meeting leaders muted the meeting. The rank-and-file kept commenting anyway. When 6,500 people are miserable enough, you can't just hit a button and make it go away.
This all happened against the backdrop of Meta cutting 8,000 employees last month, which has apparently done wonders for morale among the people who survived.
They're Also Monitoring Your Keyboard Now, Which Is Going Great
Here is a detail that should not be buried: more than 1,600 Applied AI employees signed a petition demanding Meta stop tracking their keyboard and mouse activity. The company had launched an initiative to monitor those inputs and use them to generate AI training data. Your employees' physical computing behavior as raw material. For the machine.
It is a remarkable thing to do to a workforce that is already describing its work conditions using Soviet prison camp metaphors. The petition did not apparently generate a public response from Meta, which declined to comment to Wired and did not immediately respond to the Post's request for comment either.
Meta's Own Chief Product Officer Called It a Hailstorm Marathon Where Your Teammate Gets Replaced While You're Being Filmed
Credit where it's due: Meta chief product officer Chris Cox did not try to spin this. Speaking at a recent meeting for Instagram employees, Wired reports he described the conditions as "difficult" and "brutal" and said the company had generated "the insanity of this company." He compared the employee experience to "running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we're recording you."
"It's like what the f--k," he reportedly said. Twice. To snickers.
Cox also said leadership needed to "get in touch with the company again" and stop being "overearnest" about the power of AI. He described AI as neither god nor devil, said it was nowhere near as good or as bad as people think, and noted pointedly that it "doesn't know what day of the week it is." This is the chief product officer of one of the most AI-obsessed companies on the planet. He's having a moment of clarity at a really expensive time.
Zuckerberg's Internal Memo: We Made Mistakes, Here Are Some Team Happy Hour Budgets
Mark Zuckerberg addressed the situation in an internal memo this month, which Wired obtained. He acknowledged that recent organizational changes had "ruffled feathers" and wrote that "given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more."
He promised not to carry out additional mass layoffs this year. He said he would cap the number of employees per manager, which matters because Applied AI reportedly had cases of one manager overseeing 50 workers. And in what might be the most telling detail in the entire story, he sweetened the offer by announcing he would increase budgets for team events. The gulag, but with catering.
He also wrote in the memo that work like what Applied AI does is "critical to advancing our models" and described it as a way for talented people to contribute while the company creates "other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months." That is a polished way of saying: keep doing the puzzle work, we might have something better for you eventually, maybe.
The Dingo Take
Look, the story here is not really that a company reorganization was poorly handled, or that some employees are unhappy. Those things happen everywhere. The story is that Meta assembled 6,500 skilled engineers and product managers, told them their new job was to generate training puzzles for AI models, implemented keystroke surveillance to harvest their behavior as additional data, managed them at a ratio of one boss per 50 people, and then seemed genuinely surprised when someone screamed obscenities on a company-wide call.
Meta is doing to its own workforce exactly what critics have spent years accusing it of doing to its users: treating humans as a resource to be processed and optimized in service of an algorithmic goal. The irony of engineers building AI training data by performing repetitive low-skill tasks while their keyboard activity gets recorded for further model training is so perfectly on the nose it would be funny if 6,500 real people were not living inside of it.
Cox's comments, at least, suggest someone in Zuckerberg's orbit has a functional sense of irony. But a candid speech and a team events budget are not going to fix a structural problem where a company is asking its most experienced technical talent to do work that junior contractors could handle, under surveillance, after just watching 8,000 of their colleagues get cut. Meta built a factory and staffed it with architects. The architects noticed.
