Inside Meta's 'year of intensity' as its AI overhaul, culture wars, and crackdowns collide

When CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned Meta employees in January to "buckle up" for an "intense" year, he meant it.

Determined to dominate the next era of AI, Meta has spent the past year in blitz mode. Zuckerberg has overhauled divisions, reallocated resources to new products, and poured billions into the AI arms race with OpenAI, Google, and others. Zuckerberg's push came with a marked shift in leadership tone as well, including his public celebration of what he described as more "masculine energy."

Along the way, the company has trimmed its metaverse ambitions, raised performance expectations, and cut thousands of jobs, all while chasing Zuckerberg's grand vision of "personal superintelligence."

In some ways, the moves have boosted efficiency and led to faster innovation. In others, some divisions have been roiled by internal tensions, including clashes resulting from AI reorganizations and Zuckerberg flaming the AI talent wars, according to current and former employees. Some also said Meta's layoffs earlier this year were unnecessarily demoralizing when Zuckerberg branded the affected employees as "low performers."

The company's transformation comes at a time when Big Tech is rewriting its playbook, cutting costs, toughening its tone with employees, and making massive bets that AI will determine who leads in the next decade.

Meta is wagering that moving harder and faster will help give the company an edge over its rivals. After months of a cultural reset in early 2025, employee sentiment improved in recent months, a Meta spokesperson said, citing a recent internal employee sentiment questionnaire.

Investors are worried about the company's strategy, particularly its plan to sink tens of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure and talent. The question is whether Meta is overdoing it. Shares have risen 7.5% this year, less than half that of the S&P 500, and have underperformed most of the so-called Magnificent 7 companies.

"The company must articulate its vision, show how its pieces fit together, and, most importantly, demonstrate steady growth," said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, who covers Meta.

This account of Meta's "year of intensity" is based on interviews conducted by Business Insider with more than a dozen current and former employees, analysts, and academic researchers.

The AI overhaul

Over the summer, Zuckerberg sought to change the perception that Meta was trailing behind its AI rivals. In June, the company made a $14 billion investment in AI training company Scale AI and hired its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer. Two months later, it rebranded its team focused on AI efforts to Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).

As Meta's leadership sought to reorganize teams and recruit top talent from competitors, some ex-employees went public with the view that the company lacked a coherent AI strategy.

Joena Zhang, a former Meta Superintelligence Labs employee, said in a November LinkedIn post that "nobody really knew what anyone was doing" during the first half of the year at MSL — then called GenAI. She said there were "endless" meetings that didn't result in "actual decisions." And in a July Substack post, former Meta researcher Tijmen Blankevoort wrote that Meta had "a wavering vision that was tough for team members to enthusiastically rally behind."

Meta began offering massive compensation packages to attract top AI talent from rival labs, including OpenAI and Google's AI division, DeepMind.

This created rifts between the "old guard" and newer hires by offering outsiders significantly more compensation than existing employees got. It fueled a quiet competition to prove whose ideas for AI features were more valuable, according to two MSL employees.

The tensions also revolved around access to computing resources and the prestige of being associated with the elite team at the center of MSL, as one researcher previously told Business Insider.

In August, Meta undertook its fourth major reorganization in six months to streamline its AI efforts, dividing MSL into four teams: a new TBD Lab (short for "to be determined"), a product team overseeing the Meta AI assistant, an infrastructure team, and the company's long-standing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab.

After the shake-up, it was unclear who owned which projects, and people were reassigned between teams, according to the two MSL employees, one of whom added that the flow of information between TBD and MSL wasn't always even.

Asked about the internal shake-up, a Meta spokesperson pointed Business Insider to an X post from Andy Stone, a Meta communications executive, describing previous reporting about the company's AI restructuring as "navelgazing."

At least eight of Meta's AI staffers, including researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader, left the company within two months of MSL's formation. Meta said most had been with the company for years, and that some attrition is normal for an organization of its size.

Two months after the August shuffle, Meta cut about 600 jobs as part of a wider reorganization of the MSL division. Wang told employees that the cuts were designed to speed up decision-making.

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, told Business Insider that the changes have helped Meta move faster in model releases and in integrating its AI across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

"Meta is now one of the only companies training frontier-class models and deploying them to billions of users, which is exactly where I want it to be," he said.

Meta also shook up its leadership ranks in Reality Labs, the division responsible for developing its virtual and mixed reality products.

The company is considering budget cuts for the metaverse unit that sits within Reality Labs, which could result in job cuts, a person familiar with the matter previously told Business Insider. A Meta spokesperson said that it is reallocating some of its investment "from Metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables" to match momentum, adding that the company "wasn't planning any broader changes than that."

'Intense' performance reviews

The MSL layoffs were part of a broader effort by Meta to tighten operational efficiency this year, as the company reduced layers of management and implemented a stricter performance review process than in previous years.

Zuckerberg told employees in January he had "decided to raise the bar on performance management" and would move quickly to cut about 5% of "low performers." The company cut about 3,600 jobs in February from its workforce of about 78,450 employees.

By May, it directed managers to place a higher proportion of employees in its bottom review rankings: For teams of 150 or more, 15% to 20% of employees should be rated in the "below expectations" tier, compared with 12% to 15% the previous year.

Multiple employees said the revised system created a pressure-cooker environment and encouraged more cutthroat competition between staff. Managers and employees described a shift toward short-term projects as teams looked to protect themselves from landing at the bottom of the ranking.

The requirement to place more staff in lower performance tiers saw some managers strategically leave positions open or hire employees solely to place them in the bottom tier, two managers said.

The company says employee sentiment improved in the second half of the year. Its latest internal employee sentiment questionnaire, which ran from October 20 to November 3, showed "optimism" rose to 80%, "pride" at 71% and "confidence in leadership" at 68%, according to data Meta shared with Business Insider.

Each of those metrics was up between 10 and 12 percentage points compared to the last survey, which ran April 21 through May 5, the spokesperson said. The latest survey had a 91% participation rate, Meta said.

Departures and loyalists

The combination of policy shifts, reorganizations, job cuts, and stricter performance expectations triggered a wave of departures in 2025, according to five internal farewell posts reviewed by Business Insider. Some employees said Meta's evolving political posture and internal governance changes no longer aligned with their values.

"Meta in 2025 is a very different company from what Oculus & Facebook were in 2017," one engineer, who left Meta in August after nearly eight years at the company, wrote in an internal farewell message, viewed by Business Insider. These types of notes are known internally as "badge posts."

He cited a "matter of principles" for his departure, adding that the "sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit alignment with the new US government" clashed with his personal values.

Similar themes surfaced in other employee departures this year.

"The unnecessary pressure, lack of empathy, and occasional lack of fairness," one former employee wrote in another farewell post from January, seen by Business Insider. "Fighting for scope. Narratives. Oh, the narratives - I'm so looking forward to not hearing that word for a while. Smart and kind people bending their values to survive because they've been on the edge of their seats for too long."

A Meta spokesperson said the resignations represent a small slice of the company. Meta has 78,450 employees, and head count is up 8% year-over-year.

Some departing employees told Business Insider that they no longer had a meaningful outlet to share feedback with leadership on topics such as DEI and embracing "masculine energy" because questions for Q&A sessions were preselected, and that posts critical of leadership decisions were sometimes removed from the platform.

"We will skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak or things like people-related questions that have already been answered," Meta's VP of internal communications, Jonny Oser, informed employees in an internal post earlier this year.

In a January poll titled "Measuring workplace fear," dozens of Meta employees voted anonymously on how afraid they were that speaking openly about working conditions could lead to disciplinary action. The winning responses were "extremely afraid" and "very afraid," according to a screenshot of the poll viewed by Business Insider.

Even as some employees headed for the exits, others say they are optimistic about the new environment.

Two current employees told Business Insider that Meta can be a rewarding place to work, particularly for individuals accustomed to operating in high-pressure environments.

"I would say that people who are confident in their skills and are high performers generally thrive," one senior engineer said.

Another Meta veteran said the company used to "coddle its staff" — but "that's changing."

An engineer said there are reasons to stay put. "The positives are that we are still on the frontier in R&D," they said. "There are a lot of cool AI, wearables, and robotics things going on," giving high-performing employees a chance to learn and build "a lot of good skills."

"Also, we get paid a lot, still, and get free food and snacks," they said. "That helps."