A departing Meta employee posted a biting internal video criticizing the company's AI pivot during mass layoffs. The video, obtained exclusively by Mother Jones, reveals deep internal skepticism about Meta's AI strategy even as the company reorganizes entirely around it.
The people building AI don't believe in the AI pivot. That's the story.
Meta is laying off thousands of employees while betting billions on artificial intelligence. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reorganized the company, shifted resources, and made AI the centerpiece of Meta's strategy. And the engineers who understand the technology best are publicly calling it out on their way out the door.
The video was posted internally as the employee departed, offering a final assessment of Meta's direction. While the full contents haven't been made public, sources describe it as a "scathing" critique of how AI is being prioritized over proven products and the people who build them.
This isn't happening in a vacuum. Meta has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs over the past year, cutting what Zuckerberg called "low performers" and eliminating entire teams. At the same time, the company is hiring aggressively for AI roles and pouring money into compute infrastructure.
The message to employees is clear: AI is the future, and if you're not part of that future, you're out.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: Meta's AI products haven't proven themselves. Meta AI is integrated into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but user adoption is unclear. The company's AI-generated content features have been met with skepticism. And the billion-dollar metaverse bet - which was also supposed to be the future - is now barely mentioned.
Employees remember that pivot. They remember being told the metaverse was the next big thing, that the company was renaming itself Meta to reflect that commitment, that anyone not excited about VR was missing the future.
Now those same executives are saying AI is the real future. And employees are watching their colleagues get laid off while AI budgets explode.
The morale impact is predictable. Engineers who survived layoffs are updating their LinkedIn profiles. Product managers who built successful features are watching those products get deprioritized for AI experiments. And people who've been at Meta for years are questioning whether the company knows what it's doing.
This matters because talent is how you build technology. Meta has one of the best engineering teams in the world. But if those engineers don't believe in the direction, if they're watching friends get laid off while resources go to unproven AI bets, they leave.
And they're leaving. Meta's attrition among senior engineers has reportedly increased significantly. The employees who can leave - the ones with proven track records and multiple job offers - are the ones walking out.
The video that sparked this story is just one employee's perspective. But it's a perspective that reportedly resonated internally, shared among teams, and validated concerns many employees felt but weren't saying publicly.
Meta's response has been to double down. The company insists AI is the right direction, that short-term pain is necessary for long-term transformation, that employees who don't see the vision aren't the right fit.
That might be true. Or it might be another pivot that gets abandoned when the next big thing comes along.
The technology is real. The question is whether Meta's AI bet is based on technology or fear of being left behind.
