Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, acknowledged in an internal memo that the company's rollout of its new Applied AI division was 'atrocious,' according to a report by Wired. The division, formed in March this year with 6,500 engineers and product managers, was intended to accelerate Meta's generative AI projects. Instead, employees described the transition as chaotic, with some calling it 'a gulag.'
Bosworth's Admission and Pledge
Bosworth admitted that the company undermined trust by failing to clearly explain the vision and destabilizing teams through rapid restructuring. He pledged to rekindle a more cheerful internal culture by improving communication, career growth opportunities, and office perks. Managers will be capped at 20 direct reports, employees will have access to 'AI coaching' tools, and Meta will invest in microkitchens, travel budgets, and social events to boost morale. 'I hope we can rekindle the best of the culture we joined,' Bosworth wrote.
AI Jobs Debate
In the memo, Bosworth echoed a warning from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, telling employees: 'AI won't take your job but someone who knows AI might.' He emphasized that performance will be judged not just on using AI tools but on having an impact with them. Bosworth acknowledged 'tough trade-offs' around compute resources but promised transparency and responsible investment to alleviate bottlenecks.
Applied AI Team Adjustments
Maher Saba, vice president leading the Applied AI team, also posted internally that employees drafted into the unit will now be allowed to apply for other roles within Meta. He described the group's mission as enhancing coding and agentic capabilities of Meta's frontier AI models, with potential expansion into security, debugging, and product development. Recasting Meta's old motto, Saba said the team is 'moving fast and fixing forward.'
Meta CTO on Mouse-Tracking Software
Recently, Bosworth shared a blunt message for employees unhappy about the company's new keystroke and mouse-tracking software: deal with it. When workers flooded an internal thread asking how to opt out, Bosworth replied plainly that 'there is no option to opt out of this on your work provided laptop.' The comment, first reported by Business Insider, landed to a chorus of crying, shocked, and angry-face emojis from colleagues. The angry-face emoji was also the most common reaction to the original announcement.
The tool is called Model Capability Initiative, or MCI. Rolled out this week to US-based full-time employees and contingent workers, it logs mouse movements, click locations, keystrokes, and screen content across a pre-approved list of work apps—Gmail, GChat, VSCode, and Meta's internal AI assistant Metamate among them. The goal, per an internal memo obtained by Business Insider, is to train Meta's AI agents to handle mundane computer tasks humans do without thinking—dropdown menus, keyboard shortcuts, navigating interfaces—tasks that still stump AI models.
