Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 661 posts

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#231

Post by kentonv »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #216
tunesmith wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it doesn't prove much that it hasn't happened yet. Companies might just be moving slower than you think, and are still planning on doing it. And, in many corners, "don't manually write code" is being joined by "don't manually read code" as an attractive principle.

you might have to think the way through though and these companies are already being caught up with the huge token costs at the same time. There was an interesting comment during the cloudflare layoffs (partially driven by the fact that the company was bleeding money also because of its token costs from one estimate being 5* million$ per month (I feel so silly that I accidentally had written/meant 500 and had kentonv…

> (partially driven by the fact that the company was bleeding money also because of its token costs from one estimate being 500 million$ per month, don't quote me on that though)

Cloudflare had 5000 employees (pre-layoff), so you are suggesting that every single one of them (eng, HR, legal, finance, receptionists) was using $100k tokens per month (that's $1.2M annualized, per employee), for a total of 3x gross revenue going to AI spend.

Let's imagine that this isn't absurd on its face. If true, then you'd expect Cloudflare's Q1 earnings to show a massive, massive net loss. In fact Cloudflare was cash flow positive in Q1.

The rest of your post is more qualitative, so harder to disprove, but from what I can tell, it seems equally made up.

(I work at Cloudflare.)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#232

Post by hysan »

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 feel like the increased reviewing time is consistently understated. I’m just an IC, but it seems obvious to me that you cannot cut staff and achieve increased output. There literally aren’t enough eyeballs to go around reviewing code when everyone is 2-3xing their output. I spend so much more time reviewing code; reviews that are sorely needed because I regularly catch batshit insane “fixes” that work but would quickly turn the codebase into a mess (the most recent one being a multi-hundred line diff that I went and fixed in 2 lines in 15 min). Maybe I’m underthinking it but it seems obvious that you either maintain the same output with fewer staff or you gain increased output with the same staff. All the companies that are attempting to cut staff and gain increased output are chasing an impossibility and throwing away their opportunity to accelerate.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#234

Post by emp17344 »

paytonjjones wrote: post #205
darth_avocado wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Research and experimentation on neural nets has been going on since the 70s (arguably much earlier even), but the lions share of capability changes has all been in the last couple years. Scale was really the unlock; the new pre and post training techniques and architectures are very cool and useful but they definitely aren't the differentiators when comparing to the previous era of NLP.

I think the “unlock” is that AI firms were given trillions of dollars to discover new techniques. In fact, there are very few industries where a sudden influx of that much money would not lead to rapid advancements. It’s not really unique to the AI field.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#236

Post by fzeroracer »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #230
kaydub wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are putting a ton of effort into getting to that point of having agents do the work unsupervised. Whoever gets there first is going to be the winner. I personally don't think it's possible and I haven't written a line of code since Sept 2025. There's an AI psychosis going on right now, especially among the execs or management class, and we all gotta nod our heads in agreement and burn through tokens.

I don't think it's possible either. DHH pointed out in the most recent episode of Rework that AI removes a lot of the barriers to shipping code, therefore making it possible to build in lots of different directions in ways that was prohibitive to many organizations in the past. But this isn't necessarily a good thing, companies still need to understand what to build in order to ship a cohesive product. AI is great fo…

> I believe more and more in the idea that for many startups and companies, the actual "customers" are the investors and the product-market fit that companies seek is the product of the company itself

In many respects this reflects the growing K-shaped nature of our economy. Average consumers don't matter because you really just need a small cohort of wealthy individuals to be hyper-invested in your product, 'regular' consumption is therefore just a way to keep things relatively on rails rather than the actual economic driver.

All of these AI-first companies don't actually have any market fit, so what they're doing is selling an imaginary product so that they can get investments and loans. As you said the company is the product.

Post reply on HN