Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it
Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it
Meta 成立仅数月的 AI 部门被内部工程师称为“令人心碎的古拉格”
Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years — cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI. 任何在 Meta 工作或认识 Meta 员工的人都会告诉你同样的事情：这里并不是一个快乐的地方，尤其是考虑到该公司过去几年中似乎永无止境的裁员——随着公司向人工智能领域投入数十亿美元，这些裁员反而加速了。
Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt. The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh*t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands. 据《连线》（Wired）杂志的一篇新报道显示，该公司的应用人工智能（Applied AI）团队正处于反抗的边缘。本周，一场仅限员工观看的直播演示被一名员工“劫持”，该员工在直播中情绪失控并爆出粗口，要求与会者转告一位 Meta AI 高管，称他是个“人渣”。据报道，其中一名演讲者当时用双手捂住了脸。
That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions. A report last month in Business Insider shed light on how many employees originally learned they’d be moved into the group — through a surprise email, a process that one self-described draftee described later on Reddit as “quite random.” 《连线》报道称，这次爆发反映了该部门内部积压已久的愤怒。这个成立仅三个月的部门拥有约 6,500 名工程师和产品经理，他们的任务是支持公司的 AI 研究雄心。《商业内幕》（Business Insider）上个月的一篇报道揭示了许多员工最初是如何得知自己被调入该部门的——通过一封突如其来的电子邮件，一位自称被“征召”的员工后来在 Reddit 上形容这一过程“相当随机”。
According to an internal announcement reviewed by BI, the reason they were enlisted is that Meta’s AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding. “For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples,” the announcement read. 根据 BI 查看的一份内部公告，他们被征召的原因是 Meta 的 AI 模型在编码等技术任务上仍缺乏超越人类的能力。公告写道：“为了让智能体理解人们如何使用计算机完成日常任务，我们需要用真实的案例来训练我们的模型。”
In a leaked audio recording from an internal meeting that month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his reasoning for drafting employees rather than outside contractors. Alexandr Wang — who sold his data-labeling startup Scale AI to Meta for $14.3 billion before taking the role of chief AI officer and heading up Meta Superintelligence Labs — knows the data-labeling world well, Zuckerberg said. And candidly, the average Meta employee has “significantly higher” intelligence than third-party contractors, he added, making them the better choice. 在该月的一次内部会议泄露录音中，首席执行官马克·扎克伯格解释了为何征召内部员工而非聘请外部承包商。扎克伯格表示，Alexandr Wang（他以 143 亿美元的价格将数据标注初创公司 Scale AI 出售给 Meta，随后担任首席 AI 官并领导 Meta 超级智能实验室）非常了解数据标注领域。他补充说，坦率地讲，Meta 普通员工的智力水平比第三方承包商“高得多”，这使他们成为更好的选择。
Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves “draftees.” Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. “It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” said another. 员工们形容自己是被迫加入该部门，没有真正的选择权：要么加入，要么辞职。许多人自称是“被征召者”。他们被分配的工作是什么？生成谜题和编程问题来训练 AI 模型。“这简直就是古拉格（劳改营），”一名员工告诉《连线》。“大多数人觉得这项工作令人心碎，”另一位员工说道。
It’s not just the Applied AI group where morale is lousy. More than 1,600 Meta employees company-wide have reportedly signed a petition protesting a program that monitors their clicks and keystrokes for AI training data. The mood across the company is dark enough that Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, felt compelled to address the “brutal” environment on a call with employees this week, said Wired. 士气低落的不仅仅是应用 AI 部门。据报道，全公司有超过 1,600 名 Meta 员工签署了一份请愿书，抗议一项为了获取 AI 训练数据而监控他们点击和按键行为的计划。《连线》称，公司内部的氛围非常压抑，以至于 Meta 首席产品官克里斯·考克斯（Chris Cox）不得不在此周与员工的通话中，专门回应了这种“残酷”的环境。
According to earlier reports, the Applied AI team is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year veteran of Meta who was previously a vice president in its Reality Labs division, the division that burned through $83 billion on the metaverse before Meta moved on to AI. The new organization reports up to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. Originally, the unit was structured in such a way that up to 50 employees reported to one manager. 根据此前的报道，应用 AI 团队由在 Meta 工作了 12 年的资深员工 Maher Saba 领导，他此前曾担任 Reality Labs 部门的副总裁——该部门在 Meta 转向 AI 之前，已经在元宇宙项目上烧掉了 830 亿美元。该新组织直接向 Meta 首席技术官 Andrew Bosworth 汇报。最初，该部门的架构是多达 50 名员工向一名经理汇报。
Zuckerberg, for his part, reportedly addressed the broader situation in an internal memo Friday, acknowledging that recent changes had “caused distress” and admitting the company had made mistakes that it plans to address. According to Wired, he added in his memo that “Meta’s north star is to be the best place for the most talented people in the world to make an impact.” 据报道，扎克伯格周五在一份内部备忘录中回应了这一广泛的情况，承认最近的变动“造成了困扰”，并承认公司犯了错误，计划加以解决。据《连线》报道，他在备忘录中补充说：“Meta 的北极星目标是成为世界上最有才华的人发挥影响力的最佳场所。”