Meta's newly formed Applied AI unit of 6,500 engineers is experiencing internal turmoil, with employees describing mandatory reassignments as soul-crushing and an employee disrupting a livestream to protest working conditions.

What happened: Meta created a three-month-old Applied AI team by reassigning roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers—many without choice—to generate training data (puzzles and coding problems) for AI models. This week, an employee hijacked an internal livestreamed presentation with an expletive-laden outburst, and more than 1,600 Meta employees have signed a petition protesting a monitoring program that tracks their clicks and keystrokes for AI training. CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in an internal memo that recent changes had "caused distress" and that the company had made mistakes.

Why it matters: The reassignments reflect Meta's massive AI investment strategy, which has accelerated layoffs company-wide. Meta's leadership believes internal engineers are "significantly higher" in intelligence than third-party contractors for this work—a rationale that has backfired as employees call the assignment mandatory and describe the work as "soul-crushing." The unrest signals potential friction in executing Meta's ambition to train AI models on data that reflects how people actually use computers.

What to watch: The Applied AI unit is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year Meta veteran, and reports to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Originally structured with up to 50 employees per manager, the organization's governance is under scrutiny. Meta's chief product officer, Chris Cox, felt compelled to address the "brutal" environment on a recent employee call, indicating leadership is aware of morale damage.