Meta Employee Hijacks Livestreamed Meeting and Rants About Top Exec: ‘Piece of Sh*t’

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

According to a Friday report from WIRED, Meta employees are growing increasingly frustrated with the company’s AI reorganization efforts, with one worker hijacking a livestreamed internal presentation this week to call a top executive a “piece of sh*t.”

Per the outlet, an employee interrupted a call attended by thousands of workers with a profanity-laced complaint about “being the company’s bitch” before urging presenters to contact a Meta AI executive and “tell him that he’s a piece of shit.”

The incident comes amid broader unrest inside Meta’s recently created Applied AI organization, a unit established earlier this year to support the company’s artificial intelligence efforts. Current employees who spoke to WIRED described deep dissatisfaction with both the structure of the group and the assignments they have been given.

“It’s literally the gulag,” one employee said, adding, “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”

While some employees said the work, most of which involves creating testing materials designed to evaluate AI models, was not especially difficult, they argued it lacked the creativity and technical challenges they expected when joining the company. One worker claimed that “almost all” employees are unhappy, while another said, “Most people find the work soul-crushing.”

Not to mention, WIRED also reported that more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition opposing a company initiative that tracks certain workplace activity to help generate AI training data.

In an internal memo obtained by the outlet, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged recent organizational turmoil, conceding the company has indeed made mistakes during the restructuring process. He also pledged that Meta would not conduct additional mass layoffs this year and outlined several changes intended to improve morale, including smaller management structures, increased funding for team events, and the return of assigned desks for many employees.

The tensions were also acknowledged this week by Meta chief product officer Chris Cox during a meeting for all Instagram employees, according to WIRED. Cox described the last several months as “difficult” and “brutal” and compared employees’ experience to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm.”

“It’s like, what the f*ck,” he added.

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