A revolt has erupted at Meta after roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers were involuntarily transferred, via surprise email, into a unit now calling itself the "gulag." The unrest was exposed when an unidentified Meta engineer seized a microphone during a livestreamed technical presentation last week, demanding a message be relayed to a senior Meta AI executive. The reassigned workers are tasked with generating puzzles and coding challenges to test AI models, work described by one employee as "soul-crushing" and lacking purpose. The reason for the conscription is an engineering constraint: synthetic AI-generated training data, which powered model improvements from 2022 through 2025, has hit a quality ceiling, requiring human-generated examples that existing models cannot solve. The unit, called Meta's Applied AI Engineering, was assembled in March and is led by Maher Saba, a 12-year Meta veteran. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a June 12 internal memo, "Given the complexity of these changes, we've made mistakes and will almost certainly make more."