Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees on Friday that the company had “made mistakes” in its sweeping AI restructuring, an admission delivered in an internal memo reviewed by Reuters that arrived the same week Wired reported a near-open revolt inside the new Applied A.I. Engineering unit. “Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” Zuckerberg wrote, pledging to remain “focused on providing as much stability as possible.”

The contrition lands on a workforce that no longer reads stability as on offer. According to Wired, an employee recently hijacked a livestreamed company meeting to demand attendees tell a senior AI executive he was “a piece of shit.” One presenter covered their face with their hands. Chief product officer Chris Cox, on a separate internal call, called the current environment “brutal.”

Assembled in March, the Applied A.I. Engineering unit combined roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers under Maher Saba, a 12-year company veteran and former Reality Labs vice president, reporting to CTO Andrew Bosworth. Many staff, per Wired, were given a choice to join or quit, and now refer to themselves as draftees. Their assigned work, generating puzzles and coding problems used to evaluate how reliably Meta’s and rival firms’ models can solve them, has been described by current employees as “soul-crushing” and “literally the gulag.”

The structural pathology is hard to miss. As many as 50 individual contributors reported to a single manager, a ratio Zuckerberg now says will be scaled back. Company-wide, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes.

The numbers behind the reshuffle explain the temperature. NPR reported in May that Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10 percent of headcount, reassigned 7,000 more to AI teams, and cancelled plans to fill 6,000 open roles. Reuters puts the combined reach near 20 percent of staff. In April, Meta raised 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, much of it earmarked for the same AI buildout the engineers inside it are now in revolt against.

Zuckerberg told employees the company would increase spending on offsites and team-building and stage a large-scale hackathon in July, and said he didn’t anticipate further company-wide layoffs this year. Meta declined to comment on the memo.

That a CEO who absorbed $83 billion of Reality Labs losses without public second-guessing is now apologizing inside three months speaks less to a change of temperament than to the legibility of the problem: the engineers building the model evaluations have started rating the org.

Sources