Inside Meta's AI Team, Engineers Are Calling It 'The Gulag'

Meta is spending tens of billions on AI, but inside the company, morale is cracking. Engineers in its roughly 6,500-person Applied AI group have started calling their unit the gulag, frustrated by repetitive work, and Mark Zuckerberg sent an internal memo admitting mistakes in how he reorganized the effort. The money is flowing, the people are not happy.

The frustration is about the work itself. Some engineers say they have been assigned to generate puzzles and coding problems used to train AI agents, tasks they see as tedious and beneath their skills, hence the bitter nickname. When highly paid specialists feel reduced to producing training material, resentment builds fast. Talent does not stay where it feels wasted.

The leadership acknowledgment is unusual. Zuckerberg rarely admits missteps, so an internal memo conceding mistakes in the AI restructuring signals real internal pressure. Meta has reshuffled its AI groups repeatedly while chasing a superintelligence goal, and rapid reorganizations can leave staff confused about priorities and unhappy with their roles. Reorganizing at this speed has a human cost.

It collides with a brutal talent market. Rivals are paying enormous sums to recruit top AI researchers, with reports of multibillion-dollar bidding for the best people, so an unhappy workforce is a serious risk for Meta. Losing key engineers to OpenAI, Anthropic or Google would undercut the very ambition all that spending is meant to fund. Money buys chips, but it has to keep the people too.

The honest caveat is that internal grumbling is not collapse. Big reorganizations always generate complaints, nicknames and leaks, and a company of Meta's size and resources can ride out morale dips, especially if its products keep improving. A candid memo can also be a sign of a leader trying to fix things rather than ignore them. Discontent is real, but it is not the same as failure.

So beneath Meta's massive AI spending is a workforce under strain, and even Zuckerberg admits the reorganization has gone wrong in places. A gulag nickname, a rare mea culpa, and a fierce fight for talent all at once. Winning the AI race takes more than money and chips, it takes keeping the people who build it. Watch Meta's AI retention and whether the restructuring settles down.