The CEO Rages at Conference, Calling Executives 'Dog Excrement,' as Meta Presses 6,500 Engineers into AI Data Slog

According to Insight Beating monitoring, during a Meta internal live stream event attended by thousands of people, an engineer suddenly unmuted and used profanity, accusing the AI department of "being the company's bitch" and demanding the executives be told that "he is a piece of shit." The unexpected incident caused the speaker to awkwardly cover their face, and the live chat was quickly flooded with reactions. In response to mounting grievances, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a memo of apology on June 12th and vowed to make changes.

The AI department was established in March of this year, consisting of about 6500 engineers who were forcibly transferred and given only two options: accept the new role or resign, jokingly referred to as "conscripted beefcakes." The engineers, originally responsible for social applications, are now required to weekly create two unsolvable and untraceable challenges under key monitoring and write edge tests. The tedious and mechanical labeling process has left the engineers feeling underutilized, describing their positions as a "Gulag" camp.

The practice of using highly paid engineers for labeling was initiated by Meta's Chief AI Officer, Alexander Wang. In an April meeting, Zuckerberg mentioned that Wang believed Meta's in-house staff were far more intelligent than outsourced workers and labeling data was more efficient. Ironically, after Meta's acquisition of Scale AI last year, the new leadership was shocked by the research team being forced to label data and immediately halted the practice. With Alexander Wang taking over Meta's lab, the abandoned model was resurrected on a larger scale, even causing some of Meta's security teams to be paralyzed due to forced rotations.

In addition to forced labor, Meta also implemented key monitoring internally to generate AI data, leading to over 1600 employees signing a protest. Meta's Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, admitted in an internal meeting that the recent environment has been extremely harsh, likening the employees' situation to "running a marathon in a hailstorm, suddenly your teammate is replaced, and the company is still videotaping you. What the fuck is going on here."

In the face of the crisis, Zuckerberg pledged in the memo to limit the number of employees under manager supervision and reiterated that there would be no major layoffs this year. He stated that the AI department is only a temporary transit station and that opportunities will be provided for affected employees to reallocate to more valuable positions.