Engineers and product managers in Meta’s Applied AI team say they’re being pushed into a new three-month-old unit with little choice, doing work they describe as “soul-crushing.” A hijacked employee livestream and a growing internal petition have added heat as
This week. a livestreamed. employee-only presentation inside Meta turned into a public flare-up when someone hijacked it midstream with an expletive-laden meltdown. The intruder demanded that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh_t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.
For the engineers and product managers inside Meta’s Applied AI unit. the outburst didn’t feel like a one-off prank. Wired describes it as part of a simmering revolt inside a group that is only three months old and is made up of roughly 6. 500 people. The unit. set up to support Meta’s AI research ambitions. is largely staffed by workers who say they were pulled in without a real option.
Employees describe being forced into the unit with a “join or quit” choice. and many have started calling themselves “draftees.” Their assigned work is focused on generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. One employee told Wired, “It’s literally the gulag.” Another said, “Most people find the work soul-crushing.”.
The unrest has spilled beyond the Applied AI team. More than 1. 600 Meta employees across the company have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, called the current environment “brutal” in a call with employees this week.
All of this comes as Meta continues to funnel billions into AI—while the company has also carried out seemingly endless layoffs over the last few years. TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.
The Applied AI unit’s leadership is reported to include Maher Saba. previously a vice president in Meta’s Reality Labs division. the division that burned through $83 billion on the metaverse before Meta moved on to AI. The new organization is said to report up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Early structure also included a management ratio of up to 50 employees reporting to one manager.
In an internal memo Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that recent changes have “caused distress” and admitted Meta had made mistakes it plans to address. Wired says Zuckerberg added that “Meta’s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.”
The sequence of events now puts pressure on the same question inside Meta: whether the company’s push to build and train AI is being done in a way that people can actually stand to live with. For employees describing forced assignment. surveillance for training data. and work they call soul-crushing. the promise of impact sounds a lot less certain—especially when the organization is just three months old.
Meta Applied AI revolt engineers AI training data keystrokes clicks monitoring layoffs Mark Zuckerberg Andrew Bosworth Chris Cox Maher Saba Reality Labs metaverse
So basically they’re mad they have to work? lol
Wait I saw something about them stealing keystrokes?? Like how is that even legal. And then they act shocked people are unhappy. Wouldn’t this mess up personal info too??
This reads like the “join or quit” thing is just HR being HR, but the livestream hijack is wild. The guy yelling “piece of sh_t” sounds like it was about layoffs not AI puzzles?? I dunno I feel like everything is connected now, like they’re trying to build Skynet and the workers are the prisoners. Gulag is a big word though.
I don’t even get why they’d monitor clicks and keystrokes for “AI training.” That seems creepy as hell. Also “Applied AI” is literally just coding puzzles?? Sounds fake, like it’s the same thing as those captcha games. Meta always says it’s for innovation but they’ve been laying people off forever, so of course everyone’s pissed. If someone wants to quit they should just quit… unless they can’t, which is why I guess it’s a revolt.