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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

#151

Post by theflyinghorse »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #112
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 mak…

They are making more money than ever before. Maybe Meta leadership doesn’t really care about having a coherent strategy at this point. They can afford to flail around to see if something sticks. Reminds me of Rich kids who have ability to travel the world and find themselves before settling into a career

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#152

Post by ben_w »

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.

> The gulf is bridgeable.

Only with an LLM that's actually at agent-quality.

If "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" are two rungs on a ladder, the rung before them is "useful autocomplete". Autocomplete that only gets the next token right 90% of the time won't give you compiling code.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#153

Post by mikebs1 »

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.

[flagged]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#154

Post by codemog »

zamalek wrote: post #143
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…

> Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. Ignoring instructions - whether in AGENTS.md or my prompt - is the worst of it, and it routinely happens. It just waives things that I explicitly told it to do as part of the design. Vibe coders (in the true sense, zero oversight) claim that you just need to prompt it carefully. That's completely untrue when faced with your…

Also noticed this. Their intelligence is very jagged. I’ve had them produce some highly optimized code yet fail to follow basic code guidelines.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#155

Post by dboreham »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #104
laweijfmvo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The idea that users wanted AI was always a fantasy. Especially for Meta's products. The whole hype cycle has been pure delusion. Just like the Metaverse hype cycle before it.

I suspect there are many things AI can do to help people and make their lives better. But that's not how business works: products get made and marketed because they make their owners more money. Totally different goal.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#156

Post by mullingitover »

Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle.

Business executives look at this and think "at this rate of progress we'll have self-driving cars in a few years!" and start making serious plans for that world.

In reality I think we're going to be riding bikes for a long time. That situation of increased individual contributor productivity makes engineers more valuable, and increases the utility of engineers rather than making them a burden on your budget.

Thus, cutting headcount right as they had huge potential to become vastly more productive was a stupid move. It's an admission that you don't know how to manage people effectively, which is embarrassing when you're paid mountains of money for your management skills.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#157

Post by rogerrogerr »

zamalek wrote: post #143
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…

> Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. Ignoring instructions - whether in AGENTS.md or my prompt - is the worst of it, and it routinely happens. It just waives things that I explicitly told it to do as part of the design. Vibe coders (in the true sense, zero oversight) claim that you just need to prompt it carefully. That's completely untrue when faced with your…

I’m convinced the magic bullet is deterministic checks. Linters, static analyzers, etc. Whatever you can do to create deterministic gates that the LLM simply must overcome to reach a “done” state, do it. Has been making a huge difference for my team, but sister teams are so invested in writing the perfect Make No Mistakes prompt that they just can’t see it.

Basically I treat it like a junior dev. We don’t get junior devs to write code correctly by cajoling them just right, we add CI gates. It still works.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#158

Post by grey-area »

zamalek wrote: post #143
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…

> Can you just give an agent a desired outcome and let it work, unsupervised? Absolutely not. Ignoring instructions - whether in AGENTS.md or my prompt - is the worst of it, and it routinely happens. It just waives things that I explicitly told it to do as part of the design. Vibe coders (in the true sense, zero oversight) claim that you just need to prompt it carefully. That's completely untrue when faced with your…

These are word generators, not agents, I’m really not sure why people think they could be capable agents (ie independent) when they consistently ignore instructions, generate the wrong things and then double down when questioned, etc etc.

You’ve been sold something that simply doesn’t work for the purported use case (intelligence) and instead is like a stupid database of all world knowledge with the appearance of intelligence.

Useful tools at times (if you bear in mind their limitations), but not close to intelligent, independent agents.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#160

Post by skybrian »

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.

I see this as the gap between an general-purpose agent and a coding agent. A coding agent can imagine something to be true, test it, discover that it's wrong, and recover.

But if you go beyond what can be tested easily, asking the agent to do real work rather than writing a patch, imagining things to be true is a problem.

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