Anyone who works at Meta or knows someone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing. It’s not a happy place, especially given the endless layoffs the company has made over the past few years. The reductions will only accelerate as the company pours billions into AI.
Now, a new report from Wired suggests that the company’s applied AI team is on the verge of a revolt.
The drama began this week when someone hijacked an employee-only livestream presentation, hurled expletives and demanded that participants tell a senior MetaAI executive that he was a “fuck.” One of the presenters reportedly covered his face with his hands.
Wired reports that the riot reflects simmering anger within the three-month-old force of about 6,500 engineers and product managers tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.
Employees say they were forced to join groups with no real choice to join or leave. Many refer to themselves as “draft candidates.” What tasks are assigned to them? Generate puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. “It’s literally a concentration camp,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find this job soul-crushing,” said another.
A Business Insider report last month revealed how many employees found out they were being transferred to the group via surprise emails. One self-proclaimed draftee later described the process on Reddit as “totally random.” According to an internal announcement from April seen by Business Insider, Meta’s AI models still lack the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks such as coding. “To help agents understand how people actually use computers to perform everyday tasks, models need to be trained on real-world examples,” the post said.
In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the logic behind hiring Meta’s own engineers rather than outside contractors. Alexander Wang, who sold his data labeling startup Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion before becoming chief AI officer and leading the Meta Superintelligence Lab, is no stranger to the world of data labeling, and says the company believes Meta’s average employee salary is “substantially higher.” We provide better information than third-party contractors. Then it would be better to ask them to cooperate.
Meanwhile, more than 1,600 Meta employees across the company have signed a petition protesting the program, which monitors clicks and keystrokes on AI training data. The overall mood at the company is so dark that Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, felt compelled to mention the “harsh” environment on a conference call with employees this week.
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.
According to previous reports, the Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta. He was previously vice president of the Reality Labs division, which burnt through $83 billion in the Metaverse before Meta moved to AI. The new organization will report to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.
Initially, the structure was such that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.
Zuckerberg addressed the situation in an internal memo on Friday, acknowledging that recent changes have “caused distress” and acknowledging that the company made a mistake and will address it moving forward. “Meta’s North Star is the perfect place for the world’s most talented people to make an impact,” he added in the memo, according to Wired.
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