Meta’s New AI Unit in Chaos: ‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’

During an internal livestream earlier this week at Meta, an employee hijacked a company-wide presentation with a profanity-laced tirade, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. The individual expressed resentment about “being the company’s bitch” and directed the presenters to contact a specific Meta AI executive, demanding they “tell him that he’s a piece of shit.” One presenter responded by hiding their face in their hands, as described by a witness. While the two leaders of the technical discussion quickly asked everyone to mute and continued with their agenda, employees commenting on the stream noted the “spicy” start to the session.

This outburst, which occurred on a call accessible to thousands of Meta employees, highlights growing discontent within the company’s Applied AI team, a unit created in March to bolster the work of researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk to the press, tell WIRED that there is widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers in this group. They allege that the drudgework assigned to improve AI models feels demeaning and mismatched to their skills.

“It’s literally the gulag,” one employee claimed. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.” Another employee described the assignments, such as generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them, as easy compared to their previous software development work. However, they said the new projects feel menial and that “almost all” employees appear unhappy. A third employee added, “Most people find the work soul-crushing.” Meta declined to comment for this story.

Applied AI is not the only division facing boiling tensions and what workers describe as record-low morale. Meta’s broader AI-focused restructuring, which included laying off 10 percent of the company (about 8,000 employees) last month, has created extra work and stress across several divisions, including data center engineering and Instagram, according to multiple current and former employees. Additionally, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta halt a recently launched initiative to monitor US employees’ clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. The company has since scaled back the program slightly, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions.

During a meeting this week open to all Instagram employees, Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, addressed the “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by the “insanity of this company” in recent months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox praised Instagram employees for launching features and serving roughly 2 billion users while comparing the experience to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we’re recording you.” He added, “It’s like what the fuck,” drawing laughter, before repeating himself. Cox acknowledged the need to “get in touch with the company again” and avoid being “overearnest” about AI’s power. “It is neither god, nor is it the devil,” he said. “And it’s nowhere near as good as you think it is, and it is 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.”