The conference violently curses “executives are dog shit,” and Meta forcibly compels 6,500 engineers to do AI data grunt work.

According to Beating Monitoring, during an internal live-stream meeting at Meta attended by thousands of people, an engineer suddenly “cut the mic” and blurted out swear words, accusing the AI application department of “being the company’s bitch,” and demanding that the executives be told “he is a piece of shit.” The unexpected incident left the main speaker awkwardly covering their face, and the live-stream area was quickly overwhelmed by comments. In response to the resentment building up from the reorganization, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo on June 12 apologizing and promising to make corrections.

The AI application department was set up this March, staffed by about 6,500 engineers. The engineers were forcibly reassigned, with only two choices: accept the transfer or resign. They joked to describe it as “conscripted draftees.” The engineers originally handled social applications, but now they were forced to work under key-by-key monitoring, each week creating two original model puzzles that can’t be solved and leave no trace online, while also writing edge-case tests. The dull, mechanical labeling made the engineers feel their talents were badly wasted, and they described their positions as a “Gulag” concentration camp.

The practice of using high-salaried engineers to label data traces back to Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang. In an April meeting, Zuckerberg said Wang believed Meta employees’ intelligence far outstripped that of outsourced workers, and that labeling data would be more efficient. Ironically, after Meta acquired Scale AI last year, the new leadership—shocked by the forced labeling work for R&D—immediately put a stop to it. As Alexandr Wang took charge of Meta’s lab, the discarded models were revived on a larger scale; this even led to some Meta security teams’ shift rotations grinding to a halt due to personnel being forcibly drafted.

Besides forced conscription, Meta also rolled out key-by-key monitoring inside the company to generate AI data, sparking protests from more than 1,600 employees. In an internal meeting, Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox admitted that the recent environment has been extremely brutal, describing employees’ condition as “running a marathon in a hailstorm—then suddenly your teammates are swapped out, and the company is also recording and monitoring you. What the fuck is this supposed to be?”

In the face of the crisis, in the memo Zuckerberg promised to limit the maximum number of people managers can oversee, and reiterated that there would be no large layoffs this year. He said the AI application department is only a temporary transit station, and that later on opportunities would be provided so affected employees can be reassigned to more valuable roles.