In a startling revelation, former Meta AI researcher Tijmen Blankevoort has criticized the company’s internal culture in a strongly worded exit email, likening it to a “metastatic cancer” that is spreading across the organization. His message, shared internally before his departure, paints a grim picture of life inside Meta’s AI division, one he says is plagued by fear, dysfunction, and a lack of purpose.
Blankevoort was part of the team developing Meta’s LLaMA models, a central piece in the company’s AI ambitions. Despite Meta’s rapid expansion in the world of AI, Blankevoort believes that the firm is undergoing a deep identity crisis. He describes a toxic company culture driven by ever-present performance reviews and the specter of layoffs hanging over the horizon that, in his opinion, have destroyed employee morale and stifled innovation.
“We are in a culture of fear,” he wrote, adding that most employees in the AI team don’t enjoy working there and are unclear about their mission. With over 2,000 people now working in the AI division, Blankevoort warned that repeated internal conflicts, vague objectives, and leadership failures are causing widespread confusion. “It’s not just dysfunction; it’s a metastatic cancer,” he said, underlining how deeply the cultural issues have embedded themselves in the company’s structure.
This criticism comes at a time when Meta is ramping up efforts to compete with giants like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The firm has also established a new division, Superintelligence Labs, to work on creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). It has additionally been actively recruiting top professionals in the field from all over the AI universe, making multimillion-dollar deals, according to reports, to entice researchers away from competing companies.
Recent high-profile recruits include Ruoming Pang, the former head of Apple’s Foundation Models team, who is now expected to play a key role in Meta’s push for next-gen AI tools. The company has also brought in experts from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, including Yuanzhi Li and Anton Bakhtin, to fuel its ambitious AGI roadmap.
However, this aggressive hiring strategy hasn’t gone unnoticed. OpenAI’s chief researcher, Mark Chen, recently accused Meta of using tactics akin to “breaking into our home and stealing something.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also claimed that Meta had offered $100 million signing bonuses to attract key staff, a claim Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth later denied, calling such offers rare and reserved for a handful of leadership roles.
While Meta’s recruitment binge may look staggering on paper, Blankevoort’s candid prognosis strips away cracks hidden underneath. His comments have reportedly created discussions in Meta, forcing bosses to wrestle with hard questions about the company culture.
In the rapidly moving world of artificial intelligence, it’s talent that matters at the top. But as this episode illustrates, innovation needs more than sheer genius talent; it needs a defined mission, good leadership, and a well-oiled organizational culture. And currently, Meta appears to be lacking on all three counts.
