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Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

reuters.com

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Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#111

Post by winstonp »

ilaksh wrote: post #103

My instinct (for better or worse) is usually contrarian. Most people seem very skeptical of what Meta is doing with AI. But, what if, in a way at least, it makes sense? Maybe Wang has correctly identified that the programming and agentic ability that Anthropic and OpenAI models have has largely come from armies of software engineers creating massive datasets by writing out coding and agentic problems and solutions? S…

While I mostly agree with your post, I do want to point out one thing:

> Or he could release a model trained largely by existing open weights models. Which without some huge breakthrough probably has no chance of surpassing them, so is pointless.

This seems to be categorically untrue. Composer 2.5 is a substantial improvement on its underlying Kimi base model.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#112

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ilaksh wrote: post #103

My instinct (for better or worse) is usually contrarian. Most people seem very skeptical of what Meta is doing with AI. But, what if, in a way at least, it makes sense? Maybe Wang has correctly identified that the programming and agentic ability that Anthropic and OpenAI models have has largely come from armies of software engineers creating massive datasets by writing out coding and agentic problems and solutions? S…

None of that makes sense.

What's the end goal? Meta-specific engineering, with baked-in knowledge of how FB, Threads, and WhatsApp work? General and/or coding products to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI? Some special Magic Thing which only Meta can invent which will bedazzle Meta's users?

You don't need giant datasets unless you know what you're going to do with them. OpAI and Anthropic are having enough issues making their products profitable. And those are, if not beloved, then at least respected, with a real, if patchy, reputation for usefulness.

What was Meta's pitch in this market? There were hints of interest when LeCun was still doing original R&D, and there was some distant possibility of a next-gen revolutionary product.

But now the goal seems to be to flail around doing something incoherently AI-branded with no obvious strategy.

The troops are being marched around, but no one knows where the battle is supposed to be.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#114

Post by PaulHoule »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #90
dofm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet this doesn't turn out to be Meta's problem at all. https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/165970/meta-exploring-option-to-sell... Meta bought too many GPUs, has spare GPU capacity and they are exploring renting that capacity out. The problem is not that the models need too much to do the job. If that were the case, Meta would not have spare capacity. The problem is that the models currently can't be made to do the job.

I think Meta’s massive compute investment was never about its 100,000 engineers running coding models, but its 3,500,000,000 users wanting to use AI in every single product (and some new ones: Meta AI, glasses, etc.) So I would think that’s the part that’s not being utilized anywhere near the amount they hoped...

Meta's AI is the stupidest in the business.

Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and other models can discuss and affirm my "foxwork" practice whether it is talking about natural history, fox legends, ritual magic, altar work, autonomic control, blessings, writing, character acting, costume design, skin care, selection of perfumes that will herald my unique natural scent, marketing and customer service, photography gear, "therian" gear, bags for holding my gear, street photography, etc. They always write like somebody who's read much more widely than anyone I've ever met and rival the legendary Tamamo-no-Mae for "speaking intelligently about any subject" [1]

Meta AI can crack jokes and that's about it. I guess there's a market for "stupid talk" but it's not that big.

[1] Like help me fix my washing machine that won't drain, come up with master narratives for the "polycrisis", talk about why Casey Handmer is wrong about space manufacturing, find papers about the social network of who sleeps with who at a high school, etc.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#115

Post by efficax »

I was worried this time last year that by this time this year, companies would have slashed their engineering teams down to a handful and everything would be driven by mostly autonomous agents with human guidance. But it just hasn't happened. Do I write all my code with an agent now? Yes. Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. I can produce more code than I used to, but if I want it to be good, to be stable, to do what the product manager and designers want, it's only about 2 to 3 times more code than before. And that productivity is impacted by the fact that I'm reviewing 2 to 3 times more code than before (and you have to review, even more so now than before, because if you just let opus or gpt 5 do its thing, you'll get some terrible results, and I've found a lot of engineers on my team are just letting it do it's thing without a lot of iteration).

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#118

Post by csomar »

vishalkundar wrote: post #102

The gap between "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" is way bigger than people realize. A chatbot can be wrong 10% of the time and still help you. An agent that's wrong 10% of the time is sending bad emails and making wrong API calls with no one checking.

The problem is that with text/code, judgement is hard. Here is what it looks like for physical activity: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lK7TjujKQLw It's hard to see how that it's not useful at best and could be a disaster for any unsupervised use.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#119

Post by alt227 »

andybak wrote: post #94
holoduke wrote: post #88

Mark is really a bad leader with a mwah mwah vision. He is maybe correct in some things. But the execution is really really poor. Plus he does not have followers and believers. He only got money that can simulate followers to a certain extent

If it was still possible to get verbatim results from Google then I believe "mwah mwah vision" would have been an authentic Googlewhack pointing at this comment thread.

Nice thought, but I think strict googlewhacking frowned upon quote usage.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#120

Post by orochimaaru »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #95
jalev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a problem for Meta though? They recently announced they're going to sell their excess compute, so I imagine the actual problem is they're resorting to doing that because AI isn't having nearly the effect/usage it was supposed to and now Zuck is being a sore winner about it

I agree, i don't think it is the core problem. Meta doesn't seem to be able to produce anything close to a frontier model. The selling of compute capacity seems to be acceptance of "compute is wasted on this crappy avocado model, we'd be better off allowing something better to run". The problem is clearly in the model architecture, the training and the data fed into the model which is causing them to give up on using…

Does meta have the research talent to create a SOTA frontier model? Yann LeCun has left Meta and I don’t think either alexandr wang or zuck have enough credibility to attract talent to create one.
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