The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh_t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.

That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.

Employees describe being forced into the group with no real choice: join or quit. Many call themselves “draftees.” Their assigned work? Generating puzzles and coding problems to train AI models. “It’s literally the gulag,” one employee told Wired. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” said another.

A report last month in Business Insider shed light on how many employees learned they’d be moved into the group — through a surprise email, a process that one self-described draftee described later on Reddit as “quite random.” According to an internal announcement in April reviewed by BI, Meta’s AI models still lacked the knowledge to outperform humans at technical tasks like coding. “For agents to understand how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers, we need to train our models on real examples,” the post read.