TL;DR: Meta’s CTO admitted in an internal memo this week that the company did an “atrocious job” rolling out its AI reorg, per a new Wired report—leading morale to tank. And the planned fixes essentially amount to more social events and better snacks. Meta is the year’s starkest example of a firm trying to transform into a leaner, AI-first workforce, and it’s showing us the biggest hurdle: keeping its remaining employees from revolting.

What happened: While conceding that it botched its explanation of the AI shift, the company has largely stood by the shakeup itself. To recap: In April, the firm announced it would lay off 8,000 people, and then soon after said it would reassign 7,000 more. That reshuffle fed a new division called Applied AI, where staff weren’t recruited so much as conscripted. And the work itself—generating coding puzzles and training data to sharpen Meta’s models—is reportedly so mind-numbing that one worker called Applied AI “literally the gulag.”

The morale-boosting fixes the company has proposed so far: capping managers at about 20 direct reports (down from 50), better “microkitchens” in the office, beefed-up event and travel budgets, and letting Applied AI engineers apply for other Meta roles. (The employee keystroke-and-click tracking, though, is mostly still on.)

“Tell him he's a piece of s--t”: That’s what one Meta employee reportedly demanded be relayed to an unnamed Meta AI executive during a livestreamed all-hands last week—an outburst Wired reports reflected mounting frustration inside Applied AI. It’s just one example of the explosive worker backlash to Meta’s AI pivot—negative posts about it have flooded the anonymous workplace forum Blind, and a team-building hackathon Mark Zuckerberg recently floated went over like a lead balloon.

What it’s all for: The work that Applied AI’s engineers (unhappily) do is meant to improve Meta’s consumer AI products—but the company’s track record in this space has been uneven this year. Muse Spark, Meta’s newest model, shipped in April, yet its developer API has been delayed repeatedly (which has stalled its AI revenue). And some features have arrived less than polished: In June, hackers easily exploited Meta’s AI support chatbot—which rolled out in March—to reset Instagram passwords and take over thousands of accounts.

Bottom line: Meta is now one of the biggest corporate test cases for reengineering a giant firm around AI—and it’s trying to weather the storm of employee discontent while the payoff of its AI bet remains unproven. —WK

Also at Meta…

• Facebook’s new “AI Mode” answers your questions by digging through every public post on the platform, including those from Groups and Reels.

Copy here, paste there

If your typical workflow involves constantly bouncing between your phone and laptop, you’ve probably developed a few clunky workarounds (emailing yourself links, texting photos, or saving things “for later”). This might have you wishing your devices could simply share a brain for a second—and in Apple’s ecosystem, they can. As Tech Brew reader Jack from New Jersey pointed out, the company’s Universal Clipboard is “an amazing feature” that lets you copy and paste from your iPhone to your iPad or Mac and vice versa.

How to do it: To use the Universal Clipboard, keep your devices close to each other and make sure they are both signed into the same Apple Account and have wi-fi, Bluetooth, and Handoff turned on. On one device, copy the text, photo, video, or file you desire as you normally would. The copied content is automatically added to the clipboard on your nearby device, where it stays until it’s replaced by another copy action. You can then hit paste on your other device as usual, and the same content will appear.

Why it’s helpful: “I’ve used it for any googling for links or just information to go from my phone to my MacBook,” Jack says. “Another thing is photos, so I would screenshot on my Mac and then paste on my iPad for notes. Very useful.”

Limitations: The Universal Clipboard isn’t available for some older versions of iOS and macOS, so check if your devices meet the system requirements. —CM

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We’ve watched robots throw punches in underground fight clubs, rally on ping-pong tables, and run half-marathons—and now, skipping what feels like a dozen levels in between, a robot is going to try climb Mount Everest.

Pemba, a $23,809 Unitree G1 robot, already reached the summit of Ecuador’s over 20,000-foot Chimborazo volcano earlier this month—though with some asterisks. During the 16-hour push, it walked autonomously on every stretch under a 30-degree incline. Above that, the team switched it off, zipped the 77-pound machine into a backpack, and took turns hauling it uphill. Everest is a far taller order at more than 29,000 feet, with brutal winds and freezing temperatures. (And its worst stretches blow well past 30 degrees, so there’s likely to be a lot of piggybacking.)

The engineer behind the project, a 23-year-old Frenchman named Pablo Berlanga Boemare, claims 97% of Earth is currently unreachable by wheeled or tracked robots—and wants to change that in hopes that roving machines can eventually help monitor remote, hard-to-reach wilderness for conservation efforts. He’s targeting an October summit of Everest, if the venture raises $500,000 in (what else) crypto tokens by then. “But this is not just a stunt,” he insists. “It's a hell of an engineering challenge.” Which is exactly what you say before prepping a robot to wave at a camera from the roof of the world. —WK

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