According to reports, Meta’s strategic transformation of fully betting on artificial intelligence is causing complaints among employees within the company. Employees are under intense internal pressure as multiple teams have been reorganized or even eliminated due to reprioritization over the past few months.

Internal turmoil intensifies

TAGPH12Since Zuckerberg announced 2026 as the “Year of AI Efficiency”, Meta has frozen recruitment for non-AI positions and reallocated thousands of employees to AI-related projects. An on-the-job engineer revealed that now “everyone must integrate AI into their daily work, otherwise they will be out.” Performance appraisal standards have also changed, and the contribution weight of AI skills is much higher than that of traditional projects.

Surge in work pressure

Employees generally complain about the exponential increase in workload. In order to increase the speed of model iteration, management requested to shorten the product release cycle, causing the team to have to work overtime continuously. Many employees said they received urgent tasks generated through AI internal tools on weekends and late at night, and this round-the-clock response mechanism seriously squeezed their rest time. In addition, the distribution of resources is extremely uneven - the GenAI team has obtained "nearly unlimited computing power", while some teams that maintain core applications (such as Facebook's basic functions) face huge bottlenecks due to the diversion of resources.

Brain drain risk and management attitude

Changes in the salary structure have also caused dissatisfaction. Long-term equity incentives for some employees are now linked to the company’s AI business milestones rather than overall performance. As technology giants such as Nvidia compete to poach employees, internal surveys show that the employee turnover rate in the AI ​​department has climbed to about 18% in the past six months.

Facing doubts, Meta’s chief technology officer emphasized at an internal meeting that “the transformation period will inevitably be accompanied by pain” and warned that “employees who are unwilling to embrace the AI ​​revolution can consider leaving their jobs.” This hardline attitude further fuels employee anxiety and uncertainty about the future.

Analysts pointed out that Meta’s dilemma reflects a common contradiction: when AI becomes the primary strategic task, how to balance the well-being of human employees and the needs of corporate development, the entire Silicon Valley may take time to find the answer.