Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it

A Wired report says Meta’s three-month-old Applied AI group, with about 6,500 engineers and product managers, is facing deep employee frustration after many workers were reassigned with little choice. Employees reportedly describe the work, including creating puzzles and coding tasks to train AI models, as soul-crushing, with tensions surfacing during a disrupted internal livestream.

The unrest highlights the organizational strain as Big Tech redirects talent and capital toward AI infrastructure and model training. Meta’s approach suggests companies may increasingly use internal engineers as high-quality data sources, but morale and retention risks could undermine those ambitions.

A new report suggests the unit, which employs 6,500 people, is on the verge of revolt.