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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

#131

Post by ungovernableCat »

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…

>I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds.

I'm not in the org myself I know some Meta SWEs tangentially. My understanding is that the biggest criticism is just the chaos of it all. Jumping constantly from one thing to another like headless chickens and accomplishing nothing.

It created an environment where it's kind of impossible to plan and progress your career.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#132

Post by dofm »

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...

Right. But that's the same thing, isn't it? AI can't be made to do the job in those products. The only products it can do are shallow toys.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#133

Post by paytonjjones »

darth_avocado wrote: post #107
_fat_santa wrote: post #76

I think what everyone underestimated was the absolute bonkers amount of compute it will take and how that compute must scale in order to keep up with larger and larger models.

More than that, I think people overestimate how much AI will progress as you throw more compute at it. It’s the “9 women can’t deliver a baby in a month” equivalent of AI. Additional compute won’t magically give you AGI.

Maybe not AGI, but if you look at the differences between, say, GPT-2 and GPT 5.5, it's remarkable how well it works to mostly just throw scale at the problem.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#134

Post by Avicebron »

blcknight wrote: post #109
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 gulf is bridgeable. The problem is that a lot of people are building agents without strong enough judgment layers around them. Work that can be verified with reasonable accuracy are the sweet spot right now.

How many of these layers are just trying to rediscover/rebuild the idempotence of code?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#135

Post by ramoz »

efficax wrote: post #115

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…

As crazy as it may sound, my workflow today does not look too different from a year ago - where I was already heavy into claude code.

Im not certain things will look too different a year from now either. We still have serious bottlenecks in terms of focus/attention you have for both delegating agent work and being able to review it. Even if we solve the "trust what ai does" problem, these cognitive deficit issues still exist - for teams coordinating work, even users adopting new shit, etc.

As an industry we are leaning heavy into accepting "slop" as the status quo - we care more about efficiency of output right now. Slop will get better & we can become more adaptive to living with the paradox of amazing yet delicate systems generated by AI. But I feel big shifts coming in this regard and if/when it does we may find ourselves in the dystopia of broader unemployment with worse net outcomes.

I do think the teams that ship quality with AI will do so by learning to slow down

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing...

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#136

Post by ralphington »

_fat_santa wrote: post #76

I think what everyone underestimated was the absolute bonkers amount of compute it will take and how that compute must scale in order to keep up with larger and larger models.

It will scale inefficiently until efficiency breakthroughs occur, but it's really hard to predict when those breakthroughs will happen. Plan on the worst, but be ready and capable of capitalizing when it happens!

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#137

Post by dofm »

jrockway wrote: post #91
dofm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: you wasted too much money on failing to replace yourselves so now I have to lay you off. Which is one of the two possible grand outcomes of the AI bubble, which both result in laying people off, because that is all these companies know how to do as a response to stress.

I am not sure that it has to be so zero sum. The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless. My current feeling is that it's a powerful tool I'm happy to pay to use; it doesn't replace me, but it makes it easier to do higher quality work. It feels a lot like IntelliSense, or faster compilers, or getting a 32" moni…

> The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless.

This is not really somewhere in the middle, I think. It is very close to one of the ends. Because the fear-promise to the idiot-investor class was that it would have those impacts across all industries, not just us nerds. They hate us for refusing to make their silly ideas possible and having irritating fact-based reasons why they can't work, but they don't hate us enough to spend that much money replacing just us. They have lots of other people they hate paying too, and we haven't even made a dent.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#138

Post by joshuastuden »

PaulHoule wrote: post #92
_fat_santa wrote: post #76

I think what everyone underestimated was the absolute bonkers amount of compute it will take and how that compute must scale in order to keep up with larger and larger models.

I was involved in three efforts to commercialize foundation models before they were ready in the 2010s so I have a good picture of how progress works at this sort of thing and the pace a lot of the industry has been talking about is unrealistic: like people were disappointed with the rate of development of Apple Intelligence but it's actually progressed at about the rate I expected.

That seems to be because Apple's AI division sucks. OpenAI came in 2018 and chatGPT 2.0 was already way better than anything Apple ever did.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#139

Post by ijk »

GCA10 wrote: post #108
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Meta has made some very strange decisions in terms of who it's hired to lead various aspects of AI, including the model-building efforts. Also lots to marvel at re: its ability to coordinate (or not coordinate) various efforts by all these big brains. Can't help but think that Meta's digital networking expertise is built atop a human-networking clusterf*ck

From the outside Meta's attempts to pivot from open source releases to fast follow closed models fell flat when they tried to prematurely monetize it. They could have owned the open weight model world but tried to pivot to closed weight chatbots before an actually viable revenue model appeared.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#140

Post by ilaksh »

PaulHoule wrote: post #129
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…

One problem is that the AI agent market is fiercely competitive. Why build when you can buy? For the foreseeable future there will be a number of competitive models on the "efficient frontier" and I don't think one vendor will pull ahead. In that market you can build a model and spend a lot of money on it and at best get something that's on the same frontier as everybody else but just as likely end up with uncompetit…

That makes sense in a way, but remember that Meta had previously seen some brief developer glory in the initial Llama release. Going the off-the-shelf route would essentially be giving up on being on the technology frontier in this area, and not monetizing their knowledge assets.
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