Meta's AI Workers Are Revolting; Peter Thiel's Secret Society; Will Trump Free SBF?

0:00Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the Global Fashion News and Features Director and co-host of Vogue's podcast, The Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue, Chloe Mao, and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue, Chomenadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross.

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0:49This show is supported by OutShift, Cisco's incubation engine. Today's AI agents operate in silos, limiting their true potential. We've been focused on building bigger, smarter models, but scaling up is just one approach. To reach superintelligence together, we need to do more. We need to scale out. And we actually have a blueprint from 70 ,000 years ago. Humans didn't just get smarter individually. The cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals, and innovation. Agents are now at that same inflection point. They can connect, but they can't think together.

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2:49That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash uncanny. Serval.com slash uncanny. Hey, this is Brian. Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoe, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to uncannyvalleyatwired.com. It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. Okay, on to the show.

3:29Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry. I'm Brian Barrett, Executive Editor. Today on the show, we're talking about the dysfunction in Meta's newly formed AI unit and why it's been driving employee morale, which was already very, very low, even further into the ground. We'll also break down the recent online leak that shed light on Peter Thiel's invite-only group Dialogue. More than 200 names of high-profile people in government, tech, academia, beyond are listed in the documents as members and guests of this secretive society, not to mention a look at what they talk about behind closed doors.

4:05And it's a busy week for controversial figures, because we'll also get into how the former cryptocurrency founder and now convicted felon, Sam Bingman-Fried, is not only trying to make his case to get a pardon from the Trump administration, but planning a potential comeback. And a bit later in the show, we'll talk about SpaceX's acquisition of Cursor and the latest on Anthropics efforts with the Trump administration to get their latest models back online.

4:36Brian, I think we have to get started with the complete mess and mayhem that is going on inside Meta. It's bad. It's bad. It's so bad. People are not happy. Just to set the scene, the company has been laser-focused on trying to catch up and maybe win the AI race. It has poured a ton of money into creating a new AI unit, Meta Super Intelligence Labs. And they've invested a ton in AI infrastructure. They've released new models. That's been a little bit bumpy. But more recently, the company has reshuffled its staff in favor of prioritizing AI. During the company's most recent round of layoffs last month, about 7 ,000 people were transferred to work on teams focused on AI.

5:22One of these teams was Meta's Applied AI Engineering Unit, which basically supports the work of the people who are in Meta Superintelligence Labs, which is the super fancy AI lab. And perhaps it's an understatement to say things have not gone smoothly at all. Just to set the scene, too. So you work at Meta. About 8 ,000 employees were let go as part of that round, right? Yes, exactly. 10 % of the company. And then another 7 ,000 scattered to various AI units, including this one Meta applied AI unit, which people hate. They have been, in dramatic fashion, too. who a source that we talked to called it, quote, the gulag.

6:01They did say that. Which seems like a bit, seems a bit much. But last week we learned during an employee-only meeting for the meta-applied AI unit, someone interrupted the call to say that they were, quote, being the company's bitch. The same person then asked people leading the call to write to a specific meta-AI executive and, quote, tell him he's a piece of shit. We have both heard this recording, Zoe. Yes, we have. Many times. Yes. And as much as I enjoy the interruption, I even more enjoyed the deafening silence immediately after. Yeah, that was rough. And there's two things to say about this.

6:39One is that one of the reasons that people are really upset is that the work they are being asked to do, they perceive as being very menial. Meta basically took a bunch of engineers who, you know, at least in their telling to us, were working on interesting, exciting projects and said, hey, you now work in this other team. And your projects are basically like solving problems on behalf of an AI. If an AI can't do something, you help it do it. You're like, you know, doing what essentially sounds like post-training to kind of fine-tune a model and improve it for specific purposes. Employees said things like, it's not like this work is difficult.

7:19In fact, it is that the work is very not challenging. It's chill. But suddenly I have no purpose in life. It feels like I'm just given these random tasks. I don't have agency anymore. And the other thing about it, which you and I have talked about, is like employees didn't have a choice about joining this team. They, it's people who had been joined Meta because in some cases, I'm sure, honestly believed in the mission of social media apps that can connect billions of people, whether you or I believe that that higher emission still holds at Meta. People presumably were there and now they are sort of training the machine.

7:55And the further context here too, Zoe, which we've talked about a lot, but is worth saying, this comes on top of Meta saying, hey, by the way, we're going to monitor your laptop usage and track what you do also in order to train AI. So if you are a human working at Meta, it suddenly feels like everything you do is just in service of the machine instead of in service of something bigger. Yeah. And people are frustrated about this for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons that this is annoying to some people, at least, is that Meta is actually doing remarkably well as a company. It's had record-breaking or near-record-breaking quarters.

8:32But it's not having business success necessarily because of Meta's AI projects. Like, it's more, you know, and it's not to say the ad product doesn't have AI in it. But, like, there are other parts of the business that have been around for a lot longer that are actually doing exceedingly well. And now these employees are saying, hey, we actually were doing our jobs pretty well, as seen by the fact that the company is printing money. And now you are asking us to go do this other thing that is actually causing us to somewhat lose a bunch of money and force you to do these mass layoffs. So, like, that situation feels very frustrating.

9:10I think it's so interesting that it's risen to a level that management has had to address it in very open forums. We reported late last week, as part of her starting to report on this, Mark Zuckerberg himself commented on it. And one of his proposed solutions or one of his proposed morale-boosting agenda items was, hey, let's do a hackathon. Yeah. Which went over, how'd that go over, Zoila? Okay. How did the meta rank and file respond to the hackathon idea? Well, this was an exciting week for Wired. We got a bunch of news from inside meta. I saw that and I was like, we're going to mention this in story one, but this is actually story two.

9:49We're going to do two separate scoops on this because the hackathon was its own saga. But yeah, we saw employees basically immediately jump into the comments and ratio people that were talking about the hackathon in positive terms. They were saying things like, we're not a company that has a hackathon culture anymore. I simply don't have time to do a hackathon. Like, I'm stressed about my actual work and you want me to go play with fun toys. Like, no, thank you. People were pissed. It feels like meta has drifted pretty clearly from the days in which, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was the hacker in chief.

10:22The management seems not to realize that. Or they do realize that and they don't really care because they are in the process of laying people off anyway. They have big bets going on AI where you maybe don't need as many people in the future. You sort of trust that AI can do a lot of these jobs at some point along the way. I want to go to story three, though, because we did have a lot of stories on this. Which is, Meta did acknowledge that the communication over the reorg was, quote, atrocious. That's from Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer and longtime high-up figure at Meta. But again, the solutions that Bos suggested felt to me like they may have missed the mark internally.

11:03I don't know. I don't work at Meta. But things like capping managers at 20 direct reports each, still a lot of direct reports. Limiting the number of times employees can switch new managers as part of the restructurings. Sure. And then my favorite, Zoe, quote, improving micro kitchens, which is to say better snacks. Honestly, people care a lot about the snacks at big tech companies from what I have seen. So maybe this will do something. But I do think people were like, this is not the point. Like, we're worried about the mission of this company. We're worried about our jobs. You're missing the mark.

11:35I think one thing this entire saga highlighted for me was just how out of touch meta management seem to be with the rank and file employees. Because you can just tell in how Boz and Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox, the chief product officer, talk about AI that they're really genuinely excited about this moment. And they're like, all hands on deck. We're restructuring. Yeah, we have to lay some people off. But like the rest of you here, we have a chance to really change, you know, the world and this company in particular with these tools. Let's go. And then you have employees being like, I'm sorry, I'm completely beaten down.

12:12I feel like I have no agency. I have no say in what is happening here. I don't find this exciting. And in fact, it feels like you're making me train tools that could one day replace me. Although Metta has said that that's not exactly what they're doing, but it just feels like there's a huge disconnect. Well, even if the messaging is, hey, let's change the world, we're on the precipice of something huge, there's also the reality of Meta's pretty far behind in this stuff. And so as much as you say this is for a higher cause, there's also a little bit of a scramble aspect to it. There's a little bit of like, we got to just mix things up in major ways and keep shaking things up until we finally get more competitive with OpenAI, get more competitive with Anthropic.

12:54They haven't had that breakthrough yet. I think it's important to say they've had some good indicators, but the MuseSpark, which is their kind of latest model release, that rollout has been a little bumpy and delayed. We haven't seen some AI tool that they've put in Instagram or another app really take off. In fact, the early indicators appear to be that users aren't flocking to said tools. They don't love them so far. And so I think, you know, it's a really, it's a big open question. Mark Zuckerberg spent all of this money. He spent billions of dollars hiring people like Alex Wang, courting really high profile researchers to come.

13:32And I think, you know, the results of those acquisitions and that investment has yet to be seen. So it's kind of all eyes on meta for the next few months. In some ways, they went through this with Reality Labs trying to make the metaverse happen. And that never obviously materialized. And I don't think will. This is a little bit different in that other companies are showing, no, actually, you can make a little bit of a business here. At least I feel like it's a more uncomfortable position because at least with Reality Labs and trying to make the metaverse happen, they were out there on an island doing it themselves.

14:03Here, they're in a race and they are losing. So one thing I want to add, just because I think it's important that everyone knows if they don't, is that inside meta, employees are called meta mates. That is so important. Thank you. I just think if you don't know that, now you do, and your life is a little bit better for it. Yeah, it explains not everything, but a fair amount, I would say. Yeah, I'd say so. The recording from that meta meeting and the internal comms are not the only leaked materials that we've reported on this past week. We also ran a story on numerous internal records pertaining to an exclusive invite-only society co-founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel back in 2006.

14:42Their group is called Dialogue. It has spent two decades declining to disclose its member list, but now the directory of people involved in the society has become a bit clearer, thanks to a directory in the website's code that was first revealed by a Swiss hacktivist. We reviewed it independently as well, and it shows a lot of people you might expect, but also seeing them all there together is quite something. You've got U.S. officials, foreign government figures, Silicon Valley executives. It's a real melange of elites attending off-the-record annual retreats, talking about some incredible stuff that we'll get into in a second.

15:14We saw a list of guests that are set to attend Dialogue's upcoming 2026 retreat. It includes more than 200 people in positions of power. Among them are sitting Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, six members of the so-called PayPal mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, a sitting ambassador to the United States, and a partridge in a pear tree. Zoe, had you heard of dialogue before this? What's your relationship with dialogue before this leak? I had not heard of dialogue before, but other people definitely had. I think this was on some people's radar. I think Peter Thiel being involved in like a secret society where he's bringing very powerful people together did not surprise me.

15:53Certain aspects of this were really funny. Like we got some of the names of like the sessions for the 2026 retreat or event, as it were. And they were just. They're like what you would write if you were doing a bit, if you're like making fun of what dialogue might be talking about. Exactly. Exactly. Things like money does, question mark, buy happiness. That was the name of one session. Bring back nuclear, navigating World War III. And then how's your sex life? Which brings me to a really perplexing aspect of this. There's a whole dating component to dialogue. Yeah, apparently there were matchmaking options for attendees where you could say your marital status or whether you're single, whether you're interested in meeting people.

16:34What I found, I mean, that's fine. I think intellectual elites deserve love too, but it's such a small group. I feel like the number of, like I feel like the pool is pretty small for this event to have that be a focus. Maybe that's the wrong thing to get caught up on. No, I was getting caught up on all sorts of details like this. I was like marital status. All of you guys are in open relationships as far as I can tell. Like why is this even relevant? But perhaps some are not. Who's to say? It also gives a look. So what we saw was apparently they ask everyone who attends to fill out a little on a signup form, give a prediction about the future.

17:10If you're sitting around thinking like, I wonder what these people talk about when they're talking about stuff. It's really kind of what you would expect. I don't know. I had some vague, naive hope in my heart that their predictions about the future were going to be like way smarter than what we could come up with. Were they? No, no. Zoe, we could be intellectual elites. That's the thing. I know. Some of the forms that were filled out said they foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs, obviously tied to AI, some predicting an AI winter, domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders.

17:47Again, it's a lot of, not wrong necessarily, but a lot of the sort of warmish takes about AI that I think have been batted around for the last couple of years now, ever since ChatGPT kind of took off. Yeah. So if you're wondering if all of the rich, powerful people hang out together and talk about money and controlling the world, the answer is, seems like yeah. Seems like maybe. Seems like probably yeah. I do want to say, it is maybe not surprising. Like, I feel like government, tech, business, senior people, I suspect a lot of these people are talking to each other outside of the context of dialogue.

18:26But why does it draw so much interest that this particular stew of powerful people talking to each other, why does that set people off? I think it's a good question. I think there are versions of this event that contain other groups of people like politicians and other titans of industry that have been going on for a while and maybe are a little more known. But I do think we've had kind of a recalibration of power in the past two years or maybe just like who is really in charge and who is really powerful has become a little more solidified. And I think it is the tech titans that are no longer just powerful in Silicon Valley, but they're really powerful on a national political scale in the U.S., but also it seems like on somewhat of a global scale.

19:10So you're really seeing that it seems like there is, for lack of a better term, like an open dialogue between all of these power players. All right. Well, moving on to another story that caught my attention recently. Have you heard anything? Have you thought about Sam Bankman-Fried, convicted fraudster in the crypto sphere recently? I've tried really hard not to. There hasn't been much reason to. Until recently. Until recently. If anyone else is in my vote who has not thought about, I'm going to say SBF because it's easier and that's what he's known as. He was convicted a few years ago of being behind one of the biggest crypto frauds there was, which is saying something because there are a lot of big crypto fraud schemes.

19:55Basically, he ran a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX. At the same time, he was running a hedge fund called Alameda Research. And what he did was he took billions of dollars of funds that people put into FTX, and he moved them over into Alameda Research without telling anybody, and you're not allowed to do that. and he used that money in ways that were not what people who were invested in FTX intended them to be used. Anyway, he got a 25-year jail sentence, convicted on multiple counts of various things. Zoe, why are we thinking about him now? Okay, so the reason that this has come up is that Sam Bingman-Fried is lobbying Trump for a presidential pardon.

20:41Basically, he wants the president to come in and be like, okay, just kidding, your crimes are forgiven, and oftentimes this means you can get out of prison very, very early. The reason I think this is coming up is that there's been some speculation and talk around the White House that Trump might pardon around 250 people for America's 250th birthday coming up in July. This is on top of, by the way, the thousands of people tied to Jan 6th that he had already pardoned. Anyway, go ahead. Lots of pardons. No, yeah, but this would be a new list. Sam Begman-Fried wants to be one of those people. Well, I would be personally very surprised if he got on that list.

21:19Of course, Trump continues to surprise at all times. But there's a lot of opposition to him getting out of prison because, again, he defrauded many powerful people and they are very upset with him. I want to be clear. He's actively campaigning. He gave an interview from prison to Fox Business News hinting as much. It would be obviously, you know, ultimately up to the president, not up to me. Now, have you had any conversations with the White House or anyone connected to the president at all? I haven't myself. But have, say, your parents or anyone that you've been in contact with at all? I can't speak for them.

21:56I assume that you would want a pardon from the White House. Absolutely. I always forget what his voice sounds like. And I'm sure the prison phone probably doesn't do it any favors. So he has officially filed for a pardon to the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney Office. But the Trump administration, not receptive so far, which I know you said you weren't surprised by that, Zoe. I'm a little surprised. Trump had said previously that he didn't plan to pardon SBF. And again, I think he pissed people off on both sides of the aisle. So I just, you know, not impossible by any means, but it seems like it'll be a bit of a long shot.

22:33He's also not the only person who is angling for a presidential pardon. This is also going to be going back in your memory bank. But Charlie Javis. I don't remember the name. I do remember the crime. And tell us. So Charlie was convicted after defrauding JPMorgan Chase because she sold her student aid startup Frank to the bank for$175 million by lying about how many customers it actually had to a pretty extreme degree. I don't have it in front of me, but it was one of those things where it was like, oh, you could have done a little lie, but you did a big lie. She was convicted for seven years.

23:10And she's got some defenders who are trying to help her out with this. Mark Rowan, who's Apollo Global Management's CEO and was an early frank investor and testified in her defense, wrote a letter, a leniency letter to the sentencing judge. Since Trump won re-election, Rowan has also directed millions toward Republican congressional committees. And he also has direct connections to the Trump administration. So she might have a better shot because it does feel like these pardons are largely transactional in a lot of, or at least I would say Donald Trump, I don't think it's controversial to say, is a transactional kind of guy.

23:47And so, you know, this could be a reward. On the SBF front, just to go back to that quickly, the reason I was a little surprised is because on the one hand, Trump loves crypto and has sort of shown a willingness to pardon other crypto people. Like if there had been a few high profile crypto pardons. Yeah, Ross Albright. Yeah, Ross. We had Binance. Oh, right, right, right. That's even more directly crypto. Ross is more Silk Road drugs, but, you know, famously ran on crypto. But he's shown a willingness to let crypto crimes off the hook. But as you were talking, I remembered also a big part of SBF's deal was he gave a ton of money to Democratic causes and Democratic politicians.

24:28I think not necessarily because of any deeply held political feeling, but at the time, it seemed like the winning horse to back. Right, exactly. Before we go to break, we've got two shorter news updates for you. First, SpaceX's acquisition of the AI coding assistant startup Cursor on Tuesday, pretty soon after its IPO. So SpaceX announced that it was officially closing the deal for$60 billion. The agreement follows an option that SpaceX secured back in April, which gave it the right to either pay roughly$10 billion for a partnership or acquire the company for$60 billion later in the year. They went the second route, obviously.