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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

#181

Post by orphea »

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…

  Having agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle.
To having roller skates at best. And even then - they are probably with hexagonal wheels.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#182

Post by ls612 »

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…

In my limited testing Fable is far better at obeying CLAUDE.MD than Opus is.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#183

Post by iepathos »

supern0va wrote: post #148
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…

>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. I find this somewhat puzzling. I thought things were moving quickly, but at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that…

It's not all that surprising that people were worried and believed this. The AI companies and infrastructure companies partnering with them have spent a lot of money and time trying to convince people this is the case year after year. The critical clue people miss is that everyone claiming that has very clear financial incentives to convince people that's the case even when they know it isn't. Anyone who was actually building with LLMs and judging for themselves based on its performance knew fully well that wasn't the case year after year.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#185

Post by skybrian »

steveBK123 wrote: post #172
skybrian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks. Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot. If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations. Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of abili…

Seems like to make agents safe we need tentative, reversible transactions. How do you set up a travel plan and then review it? How do you modify it later?

Unfortunately, travel keeps getting less flexible, with worse cancelation policies.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#186

Post by alex1138 »

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.

Yeah this type of conflation gets used a lot

A common one is "users don't care about privacy. that's why they use facebook. [zuckerberg was right?]"

No, you silly, silly people. People want to use products that allow them to communicate or reconnect with people or ...

They don't 'want' constantly changing privacy settings or changing TOS. If this is the best HN can come up with, ostensibly filled with S Valley people... well, it says a lot

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#187

Post by lanstin »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #77
yepyoukno wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or some fuzzy yet inevitably reliable shit. The modern trend is to think intelligence is generative “like compression” or “predicting next in sequence” rather than iteratively reducing uncertainty, like those fault tolerant humans.

Compression can be defined as reducing uncertainty. If you can predict the next sequence you can compress it to 0 bytes using arithmetic coding. Reliable prediction is what enables compression and it's the link between compression and AI that everyone is talking about. No one ever in comp sci says artificial intelligence is "like compression", they correctly state that "artificial intelligence IS compression". It's a…

The factor that is missing in that analysis to me is a time based dynamic stability perspective. Humans have a pretty good ability to go off the rails in reasoning one day and wake up reasonable; a pretty good ability to pursue tasks, despite a multitude of distractions, for ten years or longer. The best models get appreciably worse over a half million tokens. Even using a bunch of limited context agents over time, they lack mental stability. They keep coming up with ideas contrary to the long term idea, and every so often generate ideas that make no sense but they have a hard time letting go of. So the pure functional LLM is compression, but AGI needs some centering process, some high level of dynamic stability to stay sane over time and in the face of 10,000 shiny pretty things to chase.

The harnesses get better, but I haven’t seen much experimentation on long term stability, at least since the “let the LLM run the candy machine” papers from a while ago.

Because the thing missing, even with the largest agentic swarms, is independent intelligence, where it’s given something to own, like say “end to end data quality as we add more clients” (for a SaaS) and it just figures out what that means at each time, mutating its role and solutions to fix the external world, without getting silly.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#189

Post by root_axis »

paytonjjones wrote: post #133
darth_avocado wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference is a lot more than just throwing scale at it, pretty much everything useful comes from an evolving landscape of post-training techniques.

Of course, param count and context length are also important because they increase the model's overall fidelity, but a base model without SFT, RHLF etc is effectively useless.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#190

Post by cyanydeez »

simonw wrote: post #173

This is a thinner TechCrunch rewrite of this Reuters story: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-z... The exact quote appears to be: > In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring…

the pessimistic take is their harness is no better than thise available and he thinks they all suck together.

from a high level, these agents absolutely do not function as a rational human through even medium scoped problems. even when you try to add memory, you just multiply halucinated context which just makes it error out on tasks in harder to detect manner.

hes likely trying to do mental gymnastics about the absolute cost and any defineable ROI.

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