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Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive “Superintelligence” unit.
But those who’ve survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren’t exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta’s 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.
Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta’s AI models, is “soul-crushing.”
“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.”
One employee-only presentation was reportedly interrupted by a disillusioned worker, who accused a Meta AI executive of “being the company’s b****,” encouraging others to write him and “tell him that he’s a piece of s***.”
Zooming out, Meta’s AI-focused restructuring has seen thousands of employees sacked, forcing those who remain to take on additional workloads. One employee who was laid off was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents almost immediately, with their colleagues’ cries to higher ups falling on deaf ears.
A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that’s then fed to train AI.
“The vision we are building towards is one where our agents primarily do the work, and our role is to direct, review and help them improve,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told staff in an April memo obtained by Reuters.
Meta is also furiously trying to contain a different surveillance-related PR crisis after Wired reported last week that Meta had discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its smart glasses.
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