Victor Tangermann, Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues, Yahoo!Finance, June 16, 2026.
Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.
Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.
Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that's already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.
In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Zuckerberg attempted to lift their spirits in what appears to be a notable failure to read the room. Specifically, the billionaire promised to host a companywide AI hackathon in July — only to get brutally shut down by workers who were in no mood for such a thing.
Meta has regularly hosted hackathons in the past, but given last month's layoff announcement, the reception was extremely chilly. [...]
For all its employees' pain and suffering, Meta has surprisingly little to show. The company continues to trip over its own feet, struggling to release impressive new AI models as its competitors pull ahead further in the ongoing AI race.
Victor Tangermann, Meta’s Super Expensive New AI Team Is Already a Complete Catastrophe, Yahoo!Finance, June 15, 2026.
Now that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dream of a metaverse has collapsed in on itself, the billionaire has moved onto his next money pit: a wildly expensive "Superintelligence" unit.
But those who've survived several brutal rounds of layoffs at the company aren't exactly thrilled to be part of his new vision for it. As Wired reports, morale within Meta's 6,500-staffer Applied AI team, which was created in March to support the Superintelligence Labs, is hitting rock bottom.
Three employees who spoke to the publication on the condition of anonymity said that the weekly busywork tasks they are being assigned, like generating puzzles to test the reliability of Meta's AI models, is "soul-crushing." [...]
A petition has also been signed by more than 1,600 employees, opposing a draconian new initiative that involves installing software on work computers to track everything employees to, including keystrokes and clicks, data that's then fed to train AI.
Homo economicus on steroids.
