A META employee stunned colleagues by hijacking a company-wide livestream and launching into an expletive-filled tirade against a senior executive.
The extraordinary outburst unfolded during an internal presentation attended by thousands of employees and quickly became the latest sign of mounting frustration within Meta’s rapidly expanding artificial intelligence operations.
According to WIRED, the employee interrupted the livestream with a rant about ‘being the company’s b****’ before urging those running the presentation to contact a Meta AI executive and ‘tell him that he’s a piece of s***.’
The disruption left at least one presenter visibly shocked. A witness told the publication that one of the meeting leaders buried their face in their hands before attempting to regain control of the call.
After asking participants to mute themselves, the presenters resumed the technical discussion, though workers then filled the chat with comments about the meeting’s unexpectedly ‘spicy’ opening moments.
The dramatic interruption comes as tensions continue to simmer inside Meta’s Applied AI division, a unit established earlier this year to support the company’s increasingly ambitious artificial intelligence initiatives.
The organization, which includes roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers, was created to assist researchers working under Meta’s AI programs.
But several employees who spoke to Wired described widespread dissatisfaction with both the structure of the group and the work they have been assigned.
One worker painted a bleak picture of life inside the division.
‘It’s literally the gulag,’ the employee said. ‘You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.’
Employees told the outlet that many of their assignments involve creating testing materials and coding challenges designed to evaluate and improve AI systems.
While some acknowledged the work was important, they argued it bears little resemblance to the type of software development and product-building roles they originally joined Meta to perform.
One employee said workers are often tasked with generating complex programming problems that AI models can attempt to solve, helping researchers train and evaluate new systems.
Another employee described the work as largely routine and lacking creativity, saying it did not fully utilize the skills they were hired for.
According to WIRED, one worker estimated that ‘almost all’ employees in the unit are unhappy, while another said bluntly: ‘Most people find the work soul-crushing.’
Some employees have even begun referring to themselves as ‘draftees,’ according to the report, because engineers selected for Applied AI reportedly have little choice but to join the division or leave the company altogether.