Drama at Meta AI’s employee-only event: Presentation hijacked and executive insulted

Meta AI's employee-only presentation hijacked liv

A livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta descended into chaos this week when someone hijacked the call with an expletive-filled rant about "being the company's bitch," then asked the people running the session to pass a message to a senior Meta AI executive—tell him "that he's a piece of shit.

" One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to a recording heard by Wired, which first reported the incident.The two meeting leaders asked everyone to mute and pressed on with their technical talk, even as employees flooded the chat with comments about the "spicy" start. The call was open to thousands of staff. The outburst, jarring as it was, didn't come out of nowhere. It landed as the latest flashpoint in what insiders describe as record-low morale across the company, and a pointed signal of how raw things have become inside Meta's expensive push into artificial intelligence.

Inside Meta's Applied AI team, formed in March to back its Superintelligence Labs

The flare-up points to deeper frustration brewing inside Meta's Applied AI unit, set up in March to support researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. The team runs about 6,500 engineers and product managers. Three current employees told Wired there's widespread unhappiness over how the group was assembled and the kind of work they've been haanded to improve AI models. Each spoke anonymously because they weren't authorized to talk to the press.

That work, by their account, is grinding. Some are asked to finish two tasks a week, mostly generating puzzles and complex coding problems to help train and test Meta's frontier models. "It's literally the gulag," one employee told Wired. "You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week." Another described the assignments as "mechanical and not creative," and far below the skill set they were hired for.

A third put it plainly: "Most people find the work soul-crushing."Many in the unit call themselves "draftees." Those picked had no real choice—join or leave the company—an unusual demand for highly valued technical staff in Silicon Valley. The group has grown in waves since early April. "It's crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in," one early member told Wired.

Layoffs and a keystroke-tracking program add to staff discontent

The unrest isn't limited to Applied AI. Meta's AI-focused restructuring, which cut roughly 8,000 employees, or 10 percent of the company, last month, has piled extra work on teams including data center engineering and Instagram.

More than 1,600 employees have signed a petition against a new program that monitors US workers' clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data. Meta has since scaled it back slightly, letting employees pause collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions.The strain has reached the top ranks too. At an all-hands for Instagram staff this week, chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the "brutal" environment, comparing the past few months to running a marathon in a hailstorm with a teammate getting swapped out mid-race.

"It's like what the fuck," he said, drawing laughs, before repeating the line. He said leaders needed to "get in touch with the company again" and stop being "overearnest" about AI.

"It is neither god, nor is it the devil," Cox added.

Zuckerberg admits mistakes and promises stability in internal memo

In a memo seen by Wired, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the changes had caused distress. "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more," he wrote, adding that he's focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible.

He repeated a vow to avoid further mass layoffs this year and said he'd cap how many employees report to a single manager—a ratio that had ballooned to 50 to one on some teams. Budgets for team events would rise, and a large hackathon planned for next month could help pull the company together.Zuckerberg also defended Applied AI directly, framing it as a waypoint rather than a destination, with members able to move into other roles across Meta in the coming months. The work, he wrote, is critical to advancing the company's models. "Meta's north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact," he said. Meta declined to comment for Wired's story.