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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

#161

Post by lanstin »

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…

Your context isn’t to give it orders, they just don’t work like that. Your context (AGENTS.me, skills, per-request context we are sending in for each request to bots) is to give it the info it needs in the language category it’s trained for the answers you want; you have to give it a clear instruction each prompt. Basically, when you have a long session, you can see this by saying, ok, now moving onto another thing, blah blah blah (implicitly ignoring all previous instructions). It can even back fire - nagging too much about don’t skip tests in the context can make it slip into the linguistic space where there is some emergency and faking the results might be justified (I imagine there is a certain amount of training out there “just making the tests pass for now, will fix later, I promise.” If you rarely mention tests except “this one is failing, please investigate what is going on” (an informational outcome not a test outcome), it doesn’t really “cheat” (tho it can leap to conclusions as always). The tests need to be some deterministic step in the process anyways, tests don’t need fuzzy word directed search capabilities. But the models just don’t have the structure to allow feeding in a ten page set of rules and follow them. You can add a step to say, please check this git commit for compliance with the 23 rules in this standards file, and it will work better to catch the gaps.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#162

Post by sebringj »

with coding, you have sort of a framework for doing it right, if you have good specs, good testing practices, strict grounding in expected results deterministically, good linting, etc... this is much easier to automate with AI for the coding part within that assuming you did your homework around it... i don't have experience with all the business layers but it seems a bit more nuanced and fuzzy as you get away from that "harness" of sorts as it doesn't have to work in the same way as code for execution and evaluation... and even if code works, it still needs tastemakers in the final ok. maybe the taste maker ability still needs a lot of work/scale to be feasible, idk, like its still earlier than later on that. maybe Elon already cracked this to an extent given his automation in various companies.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#163

Post by alex1138 »

I'm sorry if it's a non sequitur but I feel even beyond superintelligence/AI/LLM whatever of the last few years... they've always done this, it's always been somewhat hamfisted

Examples abound of "I reported Nazi hate page. Didn't violate community guidelines. I called my friend a jerk, jokingly, got a month ban

For years. Not restricted to when ChatGPT et al arrived on the scene

(Because, AI in theory makes sense. If you want to monitor things at scale you might use AI - however that's defined - to make your workload easier. When is an account being hijacked? When are bad actors infiltrating the system? Or whatever)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#164

Post by Barrin92 »

jalev wrote: post #86
_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.

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

If Meta is selling their compute and Twitter is selling their compute and the stuff doesn't do anything you don't need an economics degree to figure out what's going to happen to the price of compute. In particular because 'compute' is a euphemism given that this is far from general purpose capacity, those are specialized chips that largely do one thing

All these companies are going to sit on their gazillion data centers once the mania dies down and will have a big problem about what to do with their mountain of hardware

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#165

Post by Jyaif »

mullingitover wrote: post #156

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 engi…

Nobody knows if we are going to "just" be riding bikes for a long time. To give time for society to adapt I hope it's the case, but we really have no idea.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#166

Post by mmooss »

If a Meta employee screws up a major project, what happens? What will happen to the executives behind these mass firings and realignment - executives of one of the very top SV companies whose job is dealing with the landscape of disruptive technology development and overreacted to the latest thing? What is the standard for them?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#167

Post by mmooss »

mattas wrote: post #159

There's a disconnect between measured productivity and "anecdotal" productivity. I love this chart because it also demonstrates one of the most effective ways to increase productivity: simply reducing the workforce. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

> it also demonstrates one of the most effective ways to increase productivity: simply reducing the workforce.

You can cut costs and increase productivity by firing everyone else and taking no salary yourself. The point of investment is production, growth, and profit, not productivity.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#168

Post by wrxd »

skeledrew wrote: post #126
_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.

Bonkers compute only in the beginning. Over time it'll reduce as models are made more efficient.

Or it will stay the same as the efficiency gains will be eaten up by bigger models

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#169

Post by lanstin »

tyre wrote: post #105
PaulHoule wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, Apple Intelligence has been a boondoggle. Siri has been consistently 3+ years behind in capabilities compared to even open source equivalents. Feels less like the pace of foundation model development and more so a specific failure of one organization to do something important.

Bad capabilities but maybe less wrong output? All the funny memes of Google explaining some fake aphorism is t really something Apple product would go for. Successful navigation of technology over the decades requires some timing finesse. I don’t know.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#170

Post by sdesol »

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 even have "don't overrule me without asking" in my global AGENTS.md, and it simply doesn't do that.

You really need to look into hooks based on your coding agent. This is very much a solved problem as I demonstrate with

https://github.com/gitsense/pi-brains

I have a test repo

https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-rules-demos

that shows how you can block and warn and do other things.

You obviously can't have a "Don't make a mistake" rule though.

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