technology
Meta Employee Disrupts Livestreamed AI Team Meeting With Profanity-Laden Outburst
An Applied AI team presentation was interrupted this week when an employee demanded attendees tell a senior executive he was 'a piece of sh_t.' The incident reflects reported discontent inside the 6,500-person unit formed three months ago.
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" One presenter covered their face with their hands during the outburst, according to Wired. The Applied AI team, formed three months ago, employs 6,500 engineers and product managers. Employees describe being reassigned to the group with no real choice: join or quit.
Their assigned work consists of generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. " A report last month in Business Insider described how many employees learned of their reassignment through a surprise email. An internal announcement in April stated that Meta's AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding.
In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that same month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the decision to draft Meta's own engineers rather than outside contractors. 3 billion and took the chief AI officer role, heading up Meta Superintelligence Labs.
The company believes Meta's average employee has "higher" intelligence than third-party contractors, according to the leaked recording.
More than 1,600 Meta employees company-wide have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, addressed the "brutal" environment on a call with employees this week.
The Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta who previously served as a vice president in its Reality Labs division.
Reality Labs burned through $83 billion on the metaverse. The Applied AI team reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Originally, the team was structured so that up to 50 employees reported to one manager.
