Meta is rebranding some employees as “AI builders” and organizing them into AI-native “pods,” according to a leaked memo obtained by Business Insider.
The memo described an overhaul of roles, titles, and team structures across a 1,000-employee team within Meta’s Reality Labs. It’s part of a broader, aggressive push by Meta to adopt small teams and use AI.
The pilot program was announced last month within the Reality Labs team that builds developer tools. Everyone in the division will now have one of three titles: AI Builder, AI Pod Lead, or AI Org Lead. That’s to encourage a shift toward a flatter organization, a structure that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated.
“Our ultimate goal is to drive a step change in engineering productivity and product quality,” the memo reads. “To achieve this, we’re fundamentally rewiring how we operate, how we are structured, and how we support each other.”
When asked for comment, Meta referred Business Insider to comments earlier this year from Zuckerberg that 2026 is the year AI will begin to “dramatically change the way we work,” with projects that once required large teams potentially handled by one, “very talented” person.
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According to the memo, each pod consists of a small group of AI builders focused on specific outcomes, often working across disciplines. For example, engineers could take on design work, depending on the task. Some Meta employees have already begun referring to themselves as AI builders on LinkedIn, Business Insider previously reported.
These pods are led by Pod Leads, who oversee day-to-day operations. They are, in turn, overseen by Org Leads, who also manage performance reviews and oversee promotions — processes that will be supported by unspecified “AI systems.”
The memo said that the overall team size will remain the same under the new structure.
Meta laid off hundreds of staff on Wednesday, and this cut affected staff in Reality Labs, among other teams. A Meta spokesperson said the reorganization is not related to the cuts.
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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Prakhar Agarwal, an applied researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs who previously worked at OpenAI. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment and academic history.
My day-to-day varies a lot depending on what stage of the project we are in versus what the immediate deliverables are.
At OpenAI and Meta, you have these milestones — say, a big training or reinforcement-learning run — in 10 months. It gets intense when we’re approaching the deadline.
Whatever work I identify is always based on the current iteration of the model. If I say the model isn’t good at X and my solution helps fix X, it is based on that version of the model. If I miss the deadline, I don’t know whether the next version will have the same issues or not.
If we are further away from that deadline, then we’re mostly working on evaluations and trying to find failure cases and issues with the existing model.
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The work is super dynamic. Sometimes you think something is super easy and you’ll get it done in a day. Other times, it’s the opposite — because there are so many unknowns, it might take a week.
Working at frontier labs feels very different from Big Tech
What we’re limited by in these foundational labs is compute. It’s not like Big Tech or other places where you can keep hiring a bunch of people and give them small pieces of a task to do.
Everyone needs compute to actually do something, and as soon as you have a lot of people, the compute gets divided, so no one will be able to do anything.
You also want high-bandwidth communication between stakeholders — you don’t want 10 different layers of communication. The speed of iteration is much faster. These core groups tend to be much smaller and tighter.
The idea of a “team” is also very fluid. Each person has their own projects, but they collaborate with others to work on joint projects. At Meta and OpenAI, there are a lot of senior people and not a lot of junior people, so everyone has a decent scope of projects.
Sometimes I collaborate more with people outside my immediate team than within it. Your scope isn’t restricted to four or five people. Your scope is the problem you’re trying to solve.
Communication and going deep with coding are key
Communication is the most important aspect in these labs. Because a lot of things aren’t documented, you need to be able to articulate what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, what the next steps are, convey your results, and get feedback on your work.
Becoming comfortable going through the code and identifying the specifics is one of the most important skills I’ve seen. The speed at which the code evolves is much faster than the documentation. If you’re stuck on something, read the code and try to understand it yourself.
Having some understanding of what’s happening across different verticals also gives you a good overview of the ideas and approaches people are trying. Because everything is super related, you might learn something from there or find ways to contribute.
The biggest advantage these labs have is knowing what doesn’t work
A research paper tells you, “I did X, Y, and Z in this specific order, and it works.” But what you don’t see is that before doing X, Y, and Z, I tried 50 different things that didn’t work — and people don’t talk about that.
That, to me, is the real strength of these foundation labs. Because of all the experimentation and all the work that has already been done, the teams have built really strong intuitions. They know which things won’t work or won’t scale, and which are going to work well.
People outside often look for the gains, but they miss the point that even the misses are very valuable.
Advice for those who want to work in top labs
I don’t have a good answer for managing burnout. You’re pretty much just going with the flow. You’re working at the cutting edge, and to put it simply, if you want to be here, you can’t think about it on a strict day-to-day basis.
What I would tell my younger self is to be comfortable exploring new avenues and new ideas. What I’ve seen is that we try to play to our strengths or stay in a deterministic setting where we know we’ll do fine. But in these domains, the speed at which things are moving is so fast that you need to be able to switch to a new topic.
Build the muscle to handle being thrown into something completely new. Sometimes, it’s more psychological than a skill issue.
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Meta is dialing back the metaverse to mean something far less futuristic: an app on your phone.
The company, which spent billions of dollars to build Horizon Worlds — an immersive, virtual hangout zone on its Quest virtual reality headsets — is “shifting focus” for Horizon Worlds “to be almost exclusively mobile,” according to a blog post published on Thursday.
Horizon Worlds is part of Meta’s Reality Labs division for VR products and smart glasses, a unit that has burned nearly $80 billion since 2020.
“Last year, we began to experiment with Worlds as a mobile platform, and we saw positive momentum,” wrote Samantha Ryan, Meta’s vice president of content at Reality Labs. “Now, to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”
The move signals how dramatically Meta has redrawn its VR ambitions.
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Last month, Meta laid off roughly 10% of Reality Labs employees, closed three VR gaming studios it owned, and stopped releasing new content for Supernatural, a popular VR fitness app it acquired in 2023.
Meta said it is still committed to virtual reality hardware and supporting third-party developers who create games for it.
“We’re in it for the long haul,” Ryan wrote, and pointed to the company’s “robust roadmap of future VR headsets tailored to different audience segments.”
Meta invested nearly $150 million in VR developer platforms in 2025, Ryan wrote, and she said that popular games like “The Thrill of the Fight 2,” “Hard Bullet,” and “UG” had earned “millions” in revenue.
Still, she wrote that 86% of the time people spend in Meta’s headsets is in third-party apps, not its own. The pivot to mobile effectively pits Horizon Worlds against entrenched competitors like Roblox and Fortnite that cater to casual mobile gamers rather than VR enthusiasts with headsets.
On Meta’s latest earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitched Horizon as the natural home for “immersive 3D” content: AI-generated scenes, objects, and mini experiences. Now, rather than putting on a headset, people could just spin up that content with a prompt and then share it straight into Instagram, Facebook, or Threads, he said.
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Meta has a new president — and she’s a former advisor to President Donald Trump.
The tech giant named Dina Powell McCormick as its president and vice chairman on Monday. Powell McCormick joined Meta’s board in April before resigning in December.
Before joining Meta, Powell McCormick served as a deputy national security advisor to Trump. The president applauded her appointment on Truth Social: “A great choice by Mark Z!!”
Powell McCormick is the second former Trump official appointed to a Meta leadership position in 2026. Last week, the company hired C.J. Mahoney, a deputy US trade representative during Trump’s first term, as its chief legal officer.
Here are three things to know about Dina Powell McCormick:
She’s served under two Republican presidents
Powell McCormick worked as a Trump advisor during his first term, with a focus on the Middle East.
She had a personal tie to the region. Powell McCormick was born in Cairo, where her father was a captain in the Egyptian army. In 1977, her family moved to Dallas.
During her stint with the Trump administration, Powell McCormick oversaw a $200 billion US-Saudi arms deal, spearheaded Trump’s Middle East tour, and was considered to take over as Trump’s chief of staff or representative to the United Nations.
She left the Trump administration in 2018.
Dina Powell McCormick reunited with Trump — and his friend Elon Musk — at a 2025 NCAA wrestling match.
Mitchell Leff/Getty Images
Powell McCormick also served under President George W. Bush. She started in a personnel role, before rising to senior White House assistant and assistant secretary of state under Condoleezza Rice.
At the time of her resignation in 2007, Powell McCormick was the highest-ranking Arab American in the Bush administration.
She spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs
After leaving the Bush administration, Powell McCormick went to Goldman Sachs, where she was hired as a managing director.
Powell McCormick shot up in stature, making partner in three years. Her rapid rise sparked some bitterness among Goldman’s underclass, according to The New York Times and Vanity Fair.
Under her leadership, Goldman launched its 10,000 Women program. She also oversaw the 10,000 Small Businesses program and served as the president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation.
Dina Powell McCormick led Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program.
Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage
Powell McCormick was popular among some of Goldman’s biggest names, including Anne Black, the former president of Goldman Sachs Gives and current managing partner at JP Morgan.
“She was really a steadfast champion for me and others of us on the team, who were all promoted thanks to her,” Black told Vanity Fair. “She elevated my game, inspired me to be creative and bold, and expected us to show results.”
Powell McCormick left Goldman Sachs in 2023.
She’s married to Sen. Dave McCormick
While Powell McCormick no longer works in politics, she’s still involved through her husband: Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick.
The couple wed in 2019. Soon after, Dave began eyeing a Senate run, and Dina became involved in the campaign. She made trips to Mar-a-Lago with her husband and appeared in several ads.
Dave ended up conceding the Republican nomination to Mehmet Oz — also known as television’s Dr. Oz — in the 2022 race. Oz lost the general election to John Fetterman and was later appointed by Trump to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Dina Powell McCormick accompanied her husband to his 2024 swearing-in, which was overseen by then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
In 2024, Dave ran again, narrowly winning a Senate seat and beating incumbent Bob Casey. Dina accompanied him to his swearing-in.
Meta’s Chief Technology Officer and head of Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth, has called an all-hands meeting for January 14, describing it as the “most important” of the year.
Bosworth is also strongly recommending that Reality Labs employees attend the division’s meeting in person, two Meta employees told Business Insider.
The emphasis on in-person attendance is unusual for the division, which oversees the company’s wearables, virtual and augmented reality initiatives, and a nascent robotics unit, these employees said. Some managers have told employees to “drop what they’re doing” to attend the all-hands in person, one employee told Business Insider.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
While the division has seen some success, such as its Ray-Ban smart glasses, Reality Labs has been a costly venture for Meta, incurring losses of more than $70 billion since 2020.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shifted the company’s strategic focus toward AI and away from the metaverse. In 2025, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, as part of the major reset of the company’s AI efforts. Meta then embarked on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree, poaching top-tier AI researchers and engineers from rivals such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Reality Labs has faced repeated rounds of cuts over the past year. In December, Business Insider reported that Meta was planning budget cuts up to 30% and considering job cuts in Reality Labs.
Last April, Meta laid off employees in Oculus Studios, its in-house gaming division, and the team behind Supernatural, the VR fitness app Meta acquired for over $400 million. Those cuts followed Meta’s broader January 2025 layoffs that eliminated nearly 4,000 roles companywide, with at least 560 affecting Reality Labs employees.
In a memo obtained by Business Insider earlier last year, Bosworth referred to 2025 as “the most critical” year in his eight-year tenure at Reality Labs.
“This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure,” he wrote.
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Chief marketing officers at many of the world’s biggest brands made artificial intelligence a centerpiece of their strategies this year.
For some brands, the enthusiasm ran into risky territory. From AI-generated ads that veered into the “uncanny valley” to backlash over replacing human models and advertising creatives, AI’s growing role in advertising fueled a string of controversial marketing moments. The AI backlash even led to its own marketing trend: brands hating on AI.
A survey of more than 6,000 US consumers conducted by the brand-tracking platform Tracksuit in November found that overall sentiment toward AI-generated advertising skewed negative (39%). Neutrality was also strong among respondents, at 36%, while only 18% felt positive about brands using AI-generated content in their ads.
Matt Barash, chief commercial officer of the adtech platform Nova, said that while AI can be a useful tool for buying and placing ads, brands should be cautious when attempting to automate the creative process.
“When brands ask AI to invent stories from scratch, they don’t get innovation — they get an approximation of human emotion, and the result can make headlines for all of the wrong reasons,” Barash said.
Indeed, several major marketers did make the news for their AI-related mishaps this year. Take a look at some of the most notable AI advertising controversies of the year, below.
McDonald’s ‘most terrible’ AI holiday ad
McDonald’s Netherlands cooked up an AI-generated holiday ad this month — and quickly sent it back to the kitchen when it became clear that viewers weren’t lovin’ it.
The “most terrible time of the year” ad was intended to be a satirical take on Christmas calamities that could occur over the festive period. The 45-second spot featured a quickfire montage of cooking mishaps, broken bones at the ice rink, and Santa’s sleigh getting stuck in a traffic jam. The brand suggested its restaurants could act as a shelter from the chaos. “Hide out in McDonald’s ’til January’s here,” the ad’s narrator said.
Some social media commentators denounced the fast-food chain as a McGrinch, complaining the ad had a cynical sentiment and “creepy” characters. After initially turning off the comments on the ad’s YouTube video, McDonald’s later removed the ad from the site altogether.
In a statement, McDonald’s Netherlands said that while the ad was intended to reflect some of the stressful moments that the holidays can bring, it recognized that many of its customers feel the season is “the most wonderful time of the year.”
“We respect that and remain committed to creating experiences that offer Good Times and Good Food for everyone,” the statement said.
Coca-Cola’s metamorphosing holiday trucks
Coca-Cola already had one AI-generated holiday ad misfire under its belt, after last year’s “Holidays are Coming” rendition was criticized as “dystopian” and “soulless.” Despite that, this year it released three AI-generated holiday ads.
One of the ads, another AI rendition of the classic “Holidays are Coming” spot, caught the attention of the eagle-eyed creative community due to its lack of consistency. Sure, the wheels on the trucks went round and round — a criticism of last year’s ad was that they appeared to glide across the road — but they also appeared to change in quantity as the ad rolled on.
In the spirit of Christmas, Dino Burbidge, an independent innovation specialist, shared the gift of this handy graphic to help everyone follow along:
Dino Burbidge
PJ Pereira, cofounder of Silverside AI, the production company behind the ad, defended Coca-Cola’s use of AI in a statement.
“Coca-Cola became a pioneer in this space because, once they recognized AI as the future, they stopped debating whether it’s perfect or not — and instead focused on how to use it in the best, most creative way possible,” Pereira said.
Pereira also said that the ad performed well with consumers in testing. System1, which rates ads on a scale from 1 to 5.9 stars on their potential to drive long-term growth for brands, gave the 2025 “Holidays are Coming” ads the highest possible score: 5.9. A separate creative testing company, DAIVID, said the ad generated higher-than-average attention and brand recall scores.
Take that, haters!
Meta’s AI granny ad: a true classic of the genre
Apparel brand True Classic is a poster child of digital performance marketing, honing platforms like Facebook and Instagram to build a community of devoted customers — typically men ages 30 to 45.
So imagine its marketing chief’s shock when he realized Meta’s ad platform had swapped out his top-performing ad — a millennial man in a matching fleece set, casually posing on a stool — with that of a cheerful, yet clearly AI-generated granny sitting in an armchair.
Advertisers told Business Insider earlier this year that settings within Meta’s Advantage+ suite of AI-powered ad products had led to the platform automatically generating ad creatives on their behalf.
In a statement, Meta said that advertisers who use its full image generation feature can review the images before running their ads.
But three advertisers also told Business Insider they’d encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to “on,” even when they’d explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent some of their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn’t intend to run.
H&M’s attack of the clones
AI has helped take airbrushing to the next level. Some brands are experimenting with using generative AI to eliminate photo shoots altogether — with mixed results.
Take fast-fashion retailer H&M. In March, the company announced a plan to create “digital twins” of 30 models whose images could be used for social media posts and ad campaigns. H&M said the models would own the rights to their twins, which would include the ability to allow other brands to use them.
H&M released images of its “digital twins” in July.
H&M
H&M was aware that the move would be controversial.
“People will be divided. You know, ‘Is this good? Is this bad?'” Jörgen Andersson, H&M chief creative officer, told Business of Fashion at the time.
H&M certainly got chins wagging. American fashion influencer Morgan Riddle described the plan as “shameful.” Sara Ziff, founder of Model Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on workers’ rights in the fashion industry, said the plan raised “serious concerns.”
“In an industry that has historically been a backwater for workers’ rights, H&M’s new initiative raises critical questions about consent and compensation, and has the potential to replace a host of fashion workers — including make-up artists, hair stylists, and other creative artists in our community,” Ziff said in a statement.
In a statement sent to Business Insider for this article, an H&M spokesperson said that the brand was exploring how generative AI can support the creative process in thoughtful and responsible ways.
“We recognize that generative AI raises important questions and concerns, and we want to be transparent in acknowledging that we do not yet have all the answers, but are continuing to learn and evolve,” the H&M spokesperson said.
Strike a pose, Vogue
H&M wasn’t the only fashion brand to give AI models a twirl this year.
Readers flicking through the August 2025 issue of Vogue noticed ads for Guess carried a small label/disclaimer: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” The models, “Vivienne” and “Anastasia,” were created using AI by a London-based AI marketing agency.
Social media users slammed the ad, saying the images pushed unrealistic beauty standards and that the use of AI imagery portended bad news for creative industry jobs. Some online commenters said they would cancel their Vogue subscriptions in protest. (Vogue publisher Condé Nast said at the time that an AI model had never appeared “editorially” in Vogue.)
The cofounders of Seraphinne Vallora said in an interview with “Good Morning America” that they were looking to supplement the modeling industry, not replace it.
“We are here to co-exist together, and we will always see photography, stylists, and everyone involved in a photo shoot as incredibly important,” said Valentina Gonzalez, one of the cofounders.
AI models and the controversies surrounding them weren’t a new advertising phenomenon for 2025. Brands such as Mango and Levi’s have also faced a similar backlash for featuring AI-generated models in their marketing in recent years. A new trend does appear to be emerging, though. Brand partnerships with AI social accounts dropped by around 30% in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to transaction data from hundreds of campaigns provided by the influencer-marketing platform Collabstr.
Could AI models be the latest fast-fashion casualty?
Meta is scrambling to compete in the red-hot AI arms race, but an advocacy group is demanding nearly a dozen European countries force Meta to pump the breaks.
The European advocacy group announced complaints in 11 European countries over an upcoming Meta policy change that would allow it to scrape old user data from Facebook to train its artificial intelligence models.
Meta “plans to use years of personal posts, private images, or online tracking data for an undefined ‘AI technology’ that can ingest personal data from any source and share any information with undefined ‘third parties,'” the group, aptly named None of Your Business, or NOYB, said in a press announcement asking authorities to step in and suspend the policy.
Meta’s updated privacy policy is scheduled to go live in late June. It would impact some 400 million European users, NOYB said. The group said it was concerning that users would have to manually opt out of providing data in the future.
“Instead of asking users for their consent (opt-in), Meta argues that it has a legitimate interest that overrides the fundamental right to data protection and privacy of European users,” NOYB said. Europe has strict data privacy laws outlined in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in 2018and has had a profound effect on Big Tech’s operations in Europe.
NOYB filed complaints in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Spain.
A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, but the company previously told Reuters that its new policy followedthe law.
“We are confident that our approach complies with privacy laws, and our approach is consistent with how other tech companies are developing and improving their AI experiences in Europe (including Google and Open AI),” a Meta spokesperson said, according to Reuters.
In the United States, Meta AI has already had access to public user data and private chat conversations on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and there is noway to fully opt out of sharing your information, The Washington Post reported.
