The conference organizers angrily denounced the executives as "dog shit," and Meta forcibly recruited 6,500 engineers to do tedious AI data work.

According to Beating's monitoring, during an internal Meta live-stream meeting with thousands of attendees, an engineer suddenly cut off his microphone and swore, complaining about being "the company's bitch" in the Applied AI department and demanding that the executives be told he was "a piece of shit." The unexpected turn of events caused the speaker to cover his face in embarrassment, and the live stream was quickly flooded with comments. In response to the pent-up resentment surrounding the restructuring, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a memo on June 12th apologizing and promising to make changes. The Applied AI department, established in March of this year, comprises approximately 6,500 engineers who were forcibly recruited with only two options: accept or leave, leading to self-deprecating humor about them being "forced conscripts." These engineers, originally responsible for social applications, are now forced to create two unsolvable puzzles each week, with no trace of them online, and write edge tests, all under constant monitoring. The tedious and mechanical labeling has made the engineers feel underutilized, with some describing their roles as a "Gulag" concentration camp. The practice of using highly paid engineers for data annotation originated with Meta's Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang. Zuckerberg stated in an April meeting that Wang believed Meta's employees were far more intelligent than outsourced workers and more efficient at data annotation. Ironically, after Meta acquired Scale AI last year, the new head of the company was shocked by the forced data annotation during R&D and immediately halted the practice. With Alexander Wang taking the helm at Meta's labs, this abandoned model has been revived on a larger scale, even paralyzing some of Meta's security team's rotating shifts due to the forced recruitment of personnel. In addition to forced recruitment, Meta also implemented key monitoring internally to generate AI data, sparking a protest signed by over 1,600 employees. Meta's Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, admitted in an internal meeting that the recent environment has been extremely harsh, describing the employees' situation as "running a marathon in hail, and suddenly your teammate gets replaced, and the company is recording you on video. It is like what the fuck." In response to the crisis, Zuckerberg promised in a memo to limit the number of people a manager can oversee and reiterated that there would be no major layoffs this year. He stated that the Applied AI department is only a temporary stepping stone, and opportunities will be provided later for affected employees to be reassigned to more valuable roles.