Meta's aggressive generative AI push is making employees miserable, claims report

Not everyone at Meta is happy with the leadership's current obsession with building "personal superintelligence."

Meta, led by its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been doubling down on (generative) AI with a stated goal of building "personal superintelligence," but reports have started flowing in that it is making its employees miserable in the process.

According to the New York Times, after Meta announced that it was rolling out a new monitoring program, many workers revolted. In an internal post last month, the company told employees it would begin tracking what they typed, how they moved their mouse, and what they saw on their screen.

The program, called the Model Capability Initiative (MCI), is designed to capture data so Meta's AI can learn how people complete computer tasks. This tracking only occurs when employees use a pre-approved list of work applications, such as Gmail, Google Chat, VSCode, and Meta's internal AI assistant, Metamate.

Employees immediately condemned the initiative, calling it a privacy violation, and asked whether they could turn off the tracking, to which the company's CTO, Andrew Bosworth, responded, saying, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop." Meta spokesperson told the NYT that safeguards are in place to protect sensitive content and that the data is "not used for any other purpose."

The tech giant already has plans to lay off roughly 8,000 employees (about 10% of its workforce) starting May 20, and has canceled over 5,000 job postings. Zuckerberg has justified these cuts in the name of AI efficiency (with AI, a team of 10 can do the work that once required a much larger group). As you can imagine, this has not been good for employee morale. Many employees have been complaining on the anonymous forum Blind that leadership only cares about AI, and some feel they are being forced to train their own replacements.

While cutting jobs, the company has simultaneously engaged in one of the most aggressive hiring and spending sprees in Silicon Valley history. It has poached top AI researchers from rivals by offering compensation packages reportedly as high as $300 million and, more recently, announced plans to invest over $600 billion by 2028 to construct massive, AI-ready data centers.

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Posted Sunday 10 May 2026 at 5:07 pm AEST (my time).

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