Meta’s AI Workers Are Revolting, Peter Thiel’s Secret Society, and SBF’s Plea to Trump

This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss the meltdown that has been recently unfolding at Meta and what it says about the company’s relentless ambitions in the AI race. They also dive into the leaked messages and names of an invite-only group cofounded by billionaire tech founder Peter Thiel, and how Sam Bankman-Fried is now actively seeking a pardon from the Trump administration. Plus, they share their impressions on SpaceX acquiring Cursor and the latest on the negotiations between Anthropic and the government. Articles mentioned in this episode: - Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’ - ‘Tell Him He’s a Piece of Shit’: Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess - Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society - Anthropic Is Still at Odds With the White House Over Claude Fable 5 You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett and Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at [email protected]. How to Listen You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too. Transcript Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors. Brian Barrett: Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected]. It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. OK, on to the show. Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry. Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor. Zoë Schiffer: Today on the show, we're talking about the dysfunction in Meta's newly formed AI unit and why it's been driving employee morale, which was already very, very low, even further into the ground. Brian Barrett: We'll also break down the recent online leak that shed light on Peter Thiel's invite-only group, Dialog, more than 200 names of high profile people in government, tech, academia, beyond are listed in the documents as members and guests of this secretive society, not to mention a look at what they talk about behind closed doors. Zoë Schiffer: And it's a busy week for controversial figures because we'll also get into how the former cryptocurrency founder and now convicted felon, Sam Bankman-Fried, is not only trying to make his case to get a pardon from the Trump administration, but planning a potential comeback. Brian Barrett: And a bit later in the show, we'll talk about SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor and the latest on Anthropic's efforts with the Trump administration to get their latest models back online. Zoë Schiffer: Brian, I think we have to get started with the complete mess and mayhem that is going on inside Meta because the company— Brian Barrett: It's bad. Zoë Schiffer: It's bad. It's so bad. People are not happy. Just to set the scene, the company has been laser focused on trying to catch up and maybe win the AI race. It has poured a ton of money into creating a new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and they've invested a ton in AI infrastructure, they've released new models—that's been a little bit bumpy—but more recently, the company has reshuffled its staff in favor of prioritizing AI. During the company's most recent round of layoffs last month, about 7,000 people were transferred to work on teams focused on AI. One of these teams was Meta's applied AI engineering unit, which basically supports the work of the people who are in Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is the super fancy AI lab. And perhaps it's an understatement to say things have not gone smoothly at all. Brian Barrett: Just to set the scene too, so you work at Meta, about 8,000 employees were let go as part of that round, right? Zoë Schiffer: Yes, exactly. 10 percent of the company. Brian Barrett: And then another 7,000 scattered to various AI units, including this one Meta applied AI unit, which people hate. They have been—in dramatic fashion too. A source that we talked to called it "the Gulag." Zoë Schiffer: They did say that. Brian Barrett: Which seems a bit much. But last week we learned during an employee-only meeting for the Meta applied AI unit, someone interrupted the call to say that they were "being the company's (beep)." The same person then asked people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and, "Tell him he's a piece of (beep)." We have both heard this recording, Zoë. Zoë Schiffer: Yes, we have, many times. Brian Barrett: Yes. And as much as I enjoy the interruption, I even more enjoyed the deafening silence immediately after. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, that was rough, and there's two things to say about this. One is that one of the reasons that people are really upset is that the work they are being asked to do they perceive as being very menial. Meta basically took a bunch of engineers who, at least in their telling to us, were working on interesting, exciting projects, and said, "Hey, you now work in this other team, and your projects are basically solving problems on behalf of an AI. If an AI can't do something, you help it do it." You're doing what essentially sounds like post-training to fine-tune a model and improve it for specific purposes. Employees said things like, "It's not like this work is difficult; in fact, it is that the work is very not challenging. It's chill, but suddenly I have no purpose in life. It feels like I'm just given these random tasks. I don't have agency anymore." And the other thing about it, which you and I have talked about, is employees didn't have a choice about joining this team. Brian Barrett: It's people who had joined Meta because in some cases I'm sure honestly believed in the mission of social media apps that can connect billions of people, whether you or I believe that that higher mission still holds at Meta, people presumably were there, and now they are sort of training the machine. The further context here too, Zoë, which we've talked about a lot but is worth saying, this comes on top of Meta saying, "Hey, by the way, we're going to monitor your laptop usage— Zoë Schiffer: Right. Brian Barrett: —and track what you do also in order to train AI." So if you're a human working at Meta, it suddenly feels like everything you do is just in service of the machine instead of in service of something bigger. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, and people are frustrated about this for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons that this is annoying to some people at least is that Meta's actually doing remarkably well as a company, it's had record-breaking or near record-breaking quarters, but it's not having business success necessarily because of Meta's AI projects. And it's not to say the ads product doesn't have AI in it, but there are other parts of the business that have been around for a lot longer that are actually doing exceedingly well, and now these employees are saying, "Hey, we actually were doing our jobs pretty well as seen by the fact that the company is printing money, and now you're asking us to go do this other thing that is actually causing us to somewhat lose a bunch of money and force you to do these mass layoffs," so that situation feels very frustrating. Brian Barrett: I think it's so interesting that it's risen to a level that management has had to address it in very open forums. We reported late last week as part of first round of reporting this, Mark Zuckerberg himself commented on it and one of his proposed solutions or one of his proposed morale-boosting agenda items was, "Hey, let's do a hackathon," which went over—how'd that go over, Zoë? Zoë Schiffer: OK. Brian Barrett: How did the Meta rank and file respond to the hackathon idea? Zoë Schiffer: Well, this was an exciting week for WIRED. We got a bunch of news from inside Meta. I saw that and I was like, we're going to mention this in story one, but this is actually story two. We're going to do two separate scoops on this because the hackathon was its own saga. But, yeah, we saw employees basically immediately jump into the comments and ratio people that were talking about the hackathon in positive terms. They were saying things like, "We're not a company that has a hackathon culture anymore. I simply don't have time to do a hackathon. I'm stressed about my actual work, and you want me to go play with fun toys? No, thank you." People were pissed. Brian Barrett: It seems like Meta has drifted pretty clearly from the days in which Mark Zuckerberg was the hacker-in-chief. The management seems not to realize that, or they do realize that and they don't really care because they are in the process of laying people off anyway, they have big bets going on AI, where you maybe don't need as many people in the future, you sort of trust that AI can do a lot of these jobs at some point along the way. I want to go to story three though, 'cause we did have a lot of stories on this, which is Meta did acknowledge that the communication over the reorg was "atrocious." That's from Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer and longtime high-up figure at Meta. But, again, the solutions that Boz suggested felt to me like they may have missed the mark internally. I don't know, I don't work at Meta, but things like capping managers at 20 direct reports each—still a lot of direct reports—limiting the number of times employees can switch new managers as part of the restructurings, sure, and then my favorite, Zoë, "Improving micro kitchens," which is to say, "Better snacks." Zoë Schiffer: Honestly, people care a lot about the snacks at big tech companies, from what I have seen, so maybe this will do something. But I do think people were like, "This is not the point. We're worried about the mission of this company. We're worried about our jobs. You're missing the mark." I think one thing this entire saga highlighted for me was just how out of touch Meta management seemed to be with the rank and file employees, because you can just tell in how Boz and Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox, the chief product officer, talk about AI, that they're really genuinely excited about this moment and they're like, "All hands on deck. We're restructuring. Yeah, we have to lay some people off, but the rest of you here, we have a chance to really change the world and this company in particular with these tools. Let's go," and then you have employees being like, "I'm sorry, I'm completely beaten down. I feel like I have no agency. I have no say in what is happening here. I don't find this exciting, and in fact, it feels like you're making me train tools that could one day replace me," although Meta has said that that's not exactly what they're doing, but it just feels like there's a huge disconnect. Brian Barrett: Well, even if the messaging is, "Hey, let's change the world. We're on the precipice of something huge," there's also the reality of Meta's pretty far behind in this stuff. And so as much as you say, "This is for a higher cause," there's also a little bit of a scramble aspect to it. There's a little bit of like, "We got to just mix things up in major ways and keep shaking things up until we finally get more competitive with OpenAI, get more competitive with Anthropic." Zoë Schiffer: They haven't had that breakthrough yet, I think it's important to say. They've had some good indicators, but the Muse Spark, which is their latest model release—that rollout has been a little bumpy and delayed. We haven't seen some AI tool that they've put in Instagram or another app really take off. In fact, the early indicators appear to be that users aren't flocking to said tools; they don't love them so far. And so I think it's a big, open question. Mark Zuckerberg spent all of this money, he spent billions of dollars hiring people like Alex Wang, courting really high-profile researchers to come, and I think the results of those acquisitions and that investment has yet to be seen, so it's kind of all eyes on Meta for the next few months. Brian Barrett: In some ways, they went through this with Reality Labs trying to make the metaverse happen, and that never obviously materialized and I don't think will. This is a little bit different in that other companies are showing, "No, actually you can make a little bit of a business here at least." I feel like it's a more uncomfortable position because at least with Reality Labs and trying to make the metaverse happen, they were out there on an island doing it themselves. Here, they're in a race and they are losing. Zoë, one thing I want to add just because I think it's important that everyone knows if they don't is that inside Meta, employees are called Metamates. Zoë Schiffer: That is so important. Thank you. Brian Barrett: I just think if you don't know that, now you do and your life is a little bit better for it. Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, it explains not everything but a fair amount, I would say. Brian Barrett: Yeah. I'd say so. The recording from that Meta meeting and the internal comms are not the only leaked materials that we've reported on this past week. We also ran a story on numerous internal records pertaining to an exclusive invite-only society cofounded by billionaire tech investor, Peter Thiel, back in 2006. The group's called Dialog. It has spent two decades declining to disclose its member list, but now the directory of people involved in the society has become a bit clearer thanks to a directory in the website's code that was first revealed by a Swiss hacktivist. We reviewed it independently as well, and it shows a lot of people you might expect, but also seeing them all there together is quite something. You've got US officials, foreign government figures, Silicon Valley executives. It's a real melange of elites attending off-the-record annual retreats talking about some incredible stuff that we'll get into in a second. We saw a list of guests that are set to attend Dialog's upcoming 2026 retreat. Includes more than 200 people in positions of power. Among them are sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, a sitting ambassador to the United States, and a partridge in a pear tree. Zoë, had you heard of Dialog before this? What's your relationship with Dialog before this leak? Zoë Schiffer: I had not heard of Dialog before, but other people definitely had. I think this was on some people's radar. I think Peter Thiel being involved in a se