Meta’s aggressive AI pivot has hit a wall — and it’s inside the company’s own walls. A bombshell Wired investigation published this week, and amplified by TechCrunch, reveals that the company’s three-month-old Applied AI unit is in turmoil, with 6,500 forcibly reassigned engineers calling their workplace a “gulag” and some on the verge of open revolt.
The flashpoint came during a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week when an unidentified employee hijacked the feed with an expletive-laden outburst, demanding attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh*t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.
The Draft
The Applied AI unit was created to generate the training data Meta’s models still lack — puzzles, coding problems, and examples of how humans complete everyday tasks on computers. Employees learned they’d been “drafted” through a surprise email: join or quit. Many call themselves “draftees.” A self-described draftee wrote on Reddit that the selection process was “quite random.”
In a leaked internal meeting recording, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained why Meta chose its own engineers over outside contractors: the average Meta employee has “significantly higher” intelligence than third-party data labelers. Alexandr Wang — who sold Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion and now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs — “knows the data-labeling world well,” Zuckerberg added.
“Literally the Gulag”
“It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” said another. The unit, led by 12-year Meta veteran Maher Saba (formerly of Reality Labs) and reporting to CTO Andrew Bosworth, was initially structured with up to 50 employees per manager.
The discontent extends beyond the Applied AI group. More than 1,600 Meta employees company-wide have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. The mood is dark enough that CPO Chris Cox addressed the “brutal” environment on an internal call this week.
Zuckerberg’s Response
In an internal memo sent Friday, Zuckerberg acknowledged that recent changes had “caused distress” and admitted the company “made mistakes that it plans to address.” He reiterated that “Meta’s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.”
Whether those words will calm a workforce that feels turned into training-data machinery remains to be seen. For an organization betting billions on AI supremacy — and betting on its own employees to build it — the internal revolt raises uncomfortable questions about what that supremacy actually costs.
Sources: Wired, TechCrunch, Business Insider