new report<\/a> in Wired suggests the company\u2019s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt.<\/p>\nThe drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was \u201ca piece of sh_t.\u201d One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.<\/p>\n
That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company\u2019s AI research ambitions.<\/p>\n
Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves \u201cdraftees.\u201d Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. \u201cIt\u2019s literally the gulag,\u201d one employee told Wired. \u201cMost people find the work soul-crushing,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, 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. Even Meta\u2019s chief product officer, Chris Cox, called the current environment \u201cbrutal\u201d in a call with employees this week.<\/p>\n
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.<\/p>\n
The Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, who was previously a vice president in Meta\u2019s Reality Labs division, according to earlier reports. The new organization reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.<\/p>\n
Originally, it was structured in such a way that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.<\/p>\n
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the situation in an internal memo Friday, acknowledging that recent changes had \u201ccaused distress\u201d and admitting the company had made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his memo that \u201cMeta\u2019s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: it is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years \u2014 cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI. Now, a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":245932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-245931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}