Meta's CTO told employees this month that morale inside the company is close to the lowest he's seen in his 20 years there. The last time it felt this bad, in his telling, was Cambridge Analytica.
Andrew Bosworth, known internally as Boz, made the comment during one of his regular "Tuesdays with Boz" sessions, first reported by Business Insider. He said morale was "definitely up there" with the worst stretches he could remember, then named the 2018 data scandal as the benchmark. That's the bar he's measuring the present against.
The reason isn't a mystery. Meta laid off roughly 8,000 people earlier this year, about 10% of its workforce, and closed another 6,000 open roles. It then moved around 7,000 remaining employees into AI work, and according to The Guardian, internal messaging made the math clear: those transfers weren't optional. All in, about one in five Meta employees either lost their job or had their role rebuilt around AI.
The pain is concentrated in one place. Meta's new Applied AI unit, a roughly 6,500-person group led by Reality Labs veteran Maher Saba, has become the symbol of the restructuring. Engineers inside it told Business Insider and TechCrunch they describe the work as "literally the gulag," with another calling it "soul-crushing." A lot of the actual job is data labeling, evaluation tasks, and coding puzzles to train Meta's models. People who joined the company to build consumer products on Instagram or WhatsApp are now grinding through AI training data. Even Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, reportedly called the environment "brutal" on a call with employees.
Zuckerberg eventually sent a memo trying to reset things, admitting the company had made mistakes through the transition and promising no more mass layoffs for the rest of the year. He couldn't promise anything beyond that. Bosworth also conceded that leadership had done "an atrocious job explaining the vision" and had "undermined the trust" employees had placed in it. That's a Meta executive saying out loud what the leaked internal screenshots already implied.
The bigger pattern is hard to miss. The same dynamic that has been hitting junior coders and offshore labor over the past year is now showing up inside one of the companies actually building the models.
INTO THE VALLEY
Meta's business is still excellent. Revenue is up 33% year over year and ad pricing keeps climbing, so the company will probably tell itself that morale is the cost of doing business in the AI era and the numbers prove the strategy works. The trouble with that logic is that the people you need most in an AI race are the ones with the most options to leave. Zuckerberg can afford to lose engineers who hate Applied AI. He probably cannot afford the next round of star researchers deciding that the gulag jokes were actually warnings.
