Before leaving the company, a former Meta AI researcher sent an internal email and openly talked about the problems in how the company works. He described Meta working culture as a place full of fear, uncertainty, and dysfunction. He said many people in the team are either confused or not motivated, and this is slowing down new ideas. His email shows the real situation inside the company where performance pressure and layoffs are directly affecting employees.
Real Situation Inside the AI Team: No Clear Goal or Energy
Tijmen Blankevoort, who was part of the LLaMA model team, wrote a detailed note before leaving. In the note, he strongly criticized Meta working culture. He said that fear and uncertainty are everywhere inside the AI division.
He wrote that most people are not enjoying their work because they do not understand what the real mission of the team is. He said, “Most people are not happy here, and they don’t even know what we are trying to build.”
He said that the work culture feels like a disease that is slowly spreading across the company. He wrote, “This is not a small problem, it is like a cancer spreading inside the organisation that is affecting everything.”
Fear Is Growing Because of Performance Reviews and Layoffs
In the same email, he also said that constant performance reviews and layoffs are lowering employee morale. Many people are unsure about their future and are avoiding taking risks, which is a big problem in a fast-moving field like AI.
He said that fear is directly hurting people’s creativity and decision-making. Leaders are not able to give clear direction, so the team is working without a clear path.
Company Is Expanding AI from Outside but Facing Internal Crisis
Blankevoort gave these strong comments at a time when Meta is trying to grow its AI work very fast. The company has started a new division called Superintelligence Labs that will focus on building artificial general intelligence. To do this, Meta is hiring top experts from the industry, sometimes giving them offers worth crores.
Ruoming Pang, who earlier led the Foundation Models team at Apple, has now joined Meta. He will play an important role in building a better AI assistant. Along with him, Meta has also hired people like Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Meta Working Culture Is Affecting Even Top Talent
Meta’s fast hiring is creating problems in the AI industry. Mark Chen, chief researcher at OpenAI, said that Meta is acting like “someone breaking into our house and stealing something.” CEO Sam Altman also said that Meta gave $100 million signing bonus offers to some of his team members.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth replied that such offers were only for a few top leadership roles and not a regular thing.
But Blankevoort’s words show a different side. Even if the company hires top talent, it will not help if the work culture is broken. According to The Information, his email made many employees think about whether the team is really going in the right direction or just pretending everything is fine.
Culture Can’t Be Fixed by Hiring Top Talent
The questions Blankevoort raised about Meta working culture are not just one person’s opinion. They are a warning. Unless the internal environment becomes clear, safe, and goal-driven, it will be hard to grow in AI. No matter how many big names are hired, without a strong and healthy culture inside the company, no tech goal can be achieved.
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