The great undraft is underway.
Meta is walking back its stance on forcing engineers to join a task force focused on AI training, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider and four people familiar with the matter.
Last month, Meta reassigned 7,000 employees to units such as an Applied AI task force to help train Meta's coming AI models.
On Wednesday, Meta sent a memo about this task force, saying the company will now "defer to each individual's choice." The company sent the email to employees who had been "drafted," as some described its Applied AI task force.
"As I emphasized before, personal agency will remain at the heart of all opportunities at Meta: we will support employees in whatever decisions they make," the memo said.
"Of course, we'd prefer everyone to stay and push to SOTA together, but we defer to each individual's choice," it read, referring to state-of-the-art.
The memo went on to say that people in the unit would have preferential placement in other parts of the company due to staffing shortages.
Meta declined to comment for this story.
Some employees on Blind called the memo an "undraft."
The task force faced significant backlash last month from employees who compared the job to data labeling.
The reversal comes after chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth addressed a broader morale crisis at the company. During an internal "Tuesdays with Boz" session on June 2, Bosworth told employees that morale was "probably one of the worst it's ever been" in Meta's 20-year history, Business Insider previously reported.
In May, Meta laid off 10% of its staff, or 8,000 people.
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Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at pdixit@insider.com or pranavdixit@protonmail.com. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration
Charles Rollet is BI's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC. Charles is based in the Bay Area, where he enjoys hiking with his dogs. You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811.
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