Meta faces internal unrest in its new AI unit

Meta is facing internal friction within its three-month-old Applied AI unit—the internal division tasked with supporting the company’s AI research. According to a report by Wired, the team is on the verge of revolt. The tension spilled over this week when an employee hijacked a livestreamed presentation with an outburst, demanding attendees insult a senior Meta AI executive. Inside the unit, which consists of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers, staff have described the work environment as a soul-crushing gulag. Multiple employees reported that most people find the assigned work of generating training data to be soul-crushing.

The Applied AI unit was formed to address gaps in Meta’s AI models. According to an internal announcement, leadership noted that the company’s models lacked the technical knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding. To resolve this, Meta populated the unit with draftees—defined as employees forced into a new department against their will—to generate training data like puzzles and coding problems. In a leaked audio recording, CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended drafting internal staff rather than third-party contractors, stating that the average Meta employee has significantly higher intelligence than third-party contractors. The unit is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta who previously served as a vice president in the Reality Labs division—which spent $83 billion on the metaverse before the company shifted to AI. The organization, which reports to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, was initially structured with up to 50 employees reporting to a single manager. The data-labeling efforts are also overseen by Alexandr Wang, the Chief AI Officer and head of Meta Superintelligence Labs, who joined Meta after selling his data-labeling startup Scale AI to the company for $14.3 billion.

The unrest is not isolated to the Applied AI unit. More than 1,600 Meta employees company-wide have reportedly signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes to gather AI training data. Wired reported that Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, addressed the brutal environment during a call with employees. In response to the distress, Zuckerberg reportedly sent an internal memo on Friday acknowledging that the recent organizational changes had caused distress and admitting that the company had made mistakes. In the memo, Zuckerberg wrote, “Meta’s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.”

Why it matters

Meta’s pivot to AI is creating significant friction between leadership and staff, highlighting the human cost of rapid organizational restructuring and the challenges of scaling AI development.