Inside Meta's "soul-crushing" Applied AI org
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOCepY3H8k4
- Original title: What is Zuckerberg doing?
Prime reacts to a Wired exposé on Meta's new ~6,500-person "Applied AI" org, where top engineers are involuntarily reassigned to hand-craft coding puzzles that train models to replace them — while their desktops are screen-recorded. Morale is in freefall; the management response (team events, a hackathon) misreads the room completely.
Meta pivoted hard from VR to AI: ~8,000 layoffs, mandatory desktop recording (later softened to allow 30-min pauses), and a new Applied AI org grown in "waves" since April. Engineers are drafted in — refuse and you leave the company — to produce ~2 toy coding problems/week that train and evaluate frontier models. They describe themselves as "draftees" doing "soul-crushing," "gulag"-like work; Prime mocks the gulag comparison while conceding meaningless work is genuinely demoralizing.
Management's reaction is the real failure: Zuckerberg promises no further mass layoffs this year, caps absurd 50:1 manager ratios, funds team events, and runs a burnout-curing hackathon on the same products people already resent. Meanwhile Facebook ships unparsable JSON to production (lexer errors leaking to the front end) amid Down Detector spikes. Chief product officer Chris Cox's honest framing — AI is "neither God nor the devil... nowhere near as good or bad as you think, and it doesn't know what day of the week it is" — lands better than the plan. Prime's thesis: low morale + instability + weird management = a slow-motion implosion of a once-prestigious workplace, even as ad revenue stays enormous.