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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

#191

Post by simonw »

cyanydeez wrote: post #190
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 abso…

I expect it's a model problem and not a harness problem, purely because some of the best harnesses (including OpenAI Codex itself) are open source and can be very easily tried against a new model.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#192

Post by sdesol »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #157
zamalek wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why aren't the teams using shared checks? Are the codes in different repos?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#193

Post by atomicnumber3 »

iepathos wrote: post #183
supern0va wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I've said this before: if anthropic (et al) thought they genuinely had a shot at replacing even 30% of white collar work, they would ABSOLUTELY NOT warn ANYONE. They would do what oil, leaded gas, and cigarette companies did. Swear under oath this is completely safe, commit GRIEVOUS societal harm that you explicitly promised wouldn't happen, and then end up in history books instead of jail for reasons beyond my ability to fathom.

No. The very fact they are trying to "warn" us means it's all marketing.

This has been corroborated for me on the engineering front that I can't find a single IC I respect who actually thought there was any evidence AI was going to live up to the hype. I saw a lot of people I always thought were idiots/sycophants/brown nosers go insane with AI. Never saw anyone id trust to help me cross a street blindfolded say more that "I may be wrong, but I'm not seeing any evidence yet".

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#194

Post by skeledrew »

wrxd wrote: post #168
skeledrew wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nah they'll hit a ceiling. Can only get so big before things collapse. And besides, they've already churned through the Internet's data. Not much new content left in the wild and patterns in other data forms (audio, image, etc should be pretty low by comparison.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#195

Post by rogerrogerr »

sdesol wrote: post #192
rogerrogerr wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why aren't the teams using shared checks? Are the codes in different repos?

They’re very, very different projects.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#196

Post by cyanydeez »

simonw wrote: post #191
cyanydeez wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abso…

I expect it's a model problem and not a harness problem, purely because some of the best harnesses (including OpenAI Codex itself) are open source and can be very easily tried against a new model.

and I'm saying all the harnesses in the world arn't going to solve the myopic ability.

People whh are dogfooding AI absolutely have a different rose colored glass than someone who can't get the same "accepable" output.

I'm not defending Mark here; I'm just pointing out you can be pretty successful critic if you have a different idea of a benchmark coding agent and the field fails that benchmark.

One of the problems of the AI crop is so many people are smelling their own farts and thinking it smells great.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#197

Post by wwind123 »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #117

why havent big tech employees formed a union?

That's a great question. Some form of union has already started in some companies, as far as I know. But not many employees have joined those unions. Probably because most employees have high income and don't really feel like they need collective bargaining power, compared to other low-income laborers.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#198

Post by ffsm8 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #193
iepathos wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've said this before: if anthropic (et al) thought they genuinely had a shot at replacing even 30% of white collar work, they would ABSOLUTELY NOT warn ANYONE. They would do what oil, leaded gas, and cigarette companies did. Swear under oath this is completely safe, commit GRIEVOUS societal harm that you explicitly promised wouldn't happen, and then end up in history books instead of jail for reasons beyond my abili…

Fwiw , you're conflating multiple things and consequently drawing premature conclusions.

It can be massively over hyped for it's current capacity and decimate the white collar work.

A lot of the difference of opinion is down to their point of view. At my dayjob, LLMs will not live up to anything because the enterprise is not structured to take advantage of it's strength. That's unlikely to change within the foreseeable future.

I strongly suspect you mostly talked with people coming from just such a background, because it's hard to go beyond our own bubbles

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#199

Post by atomicnumber3 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #198
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before: if anthropic (et al) thought they genuinely had a shot at replacing even 30% of white collar work, they would ABSOLUTELY NOT warn ANYONE. They would do what oil, leaded gas, and cigarette companies did. Swear under oath this is completely safe, commit GRIEVOUS societal harm that you explicitly promised wouldn't happen, and then end up in history books instead of jail for reasons beyond my abili…

Fwiw , you're conflating multiple things and consequently drawing premature conclusions. It can be massively over hyped for it's current capacity and decimate the white collar work. A lot of the difference of opinion is down to their point of view. At my dayjob, LLMs will not live up to anything because the enterprise is not structured to take advantage of it's strength. That's unlikely to change within the foreseeab…

Sure, naturally. And yet parent commenter is remarking that simultaneously no AI-true-believer startups have supplanted the old money, and simultaneously despite much talk the bigcos have not slashed headcount to tiny AI-powered teams.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#200

Post by darth_avocado »

root_axis wrote: post #189
paytonjjones wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. That is what I was trying to hint at. Yes, massive compute is needed to train ai, but it isn’t the only thing. A lot of research and experimentation goes into moving the marker just a little bit. Innovation can’t be forced into weekly sprints, it takes its own time.
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