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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

#261

Post by ehnto »

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 only happens once though. I think that's where people are misled at the moment, the technology was there but required huge compute and data ingest to show improvement, but we have done that now. What's next for a giant leap is not more compute, and what new data we can provide now pales in comparison to that first ingest.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#262

Post by jack1689 »

black_knight wrote: post #247
zamalek wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, when you have a long session, you can see this by saying, ok, now moving onto another thing, blah blah blah I try to avoid > 200k contexts, as the 1M context is where I first saw the massive decrease in reliability. And my AGENTS is really short, and I said it was ignoring decisions in the prompt.

Whenever I work on a challenging question I worry about this, because Opus will easily think for 200k tokens on the first prompt. I fear any follow up discussion is lobotomised!

Yeah totally feel you on this one! To avoid it or at least limit that I usually ask it to create external memories, clearing the context window and leaving just a trace to recall the memory created for that run. I hope it might help!

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#263

Post by theturtletalks »

Schiendelman wrote: post #259
theturtletalks wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same worthwhile things we were working on before agents. I’m personally using them to autonomously build open-source Shopify for every vertical. I set out building it before AI, but AI actually makes the dream feel achievable.

Have you got booked revenue for any of those verticals, using your system?

Yes we have provided custom storefronts for people running the SaaS on-prem and we have a handful of people using our cloud hosting. This is all without any marketing efforts and word of mouth. Albeit, we launched the Shopify alternative in Dec 2025 and the Toast alternative in May 2026. The gym and grocery ones in the works.

My main goal is to first get all of these open-source alternatives to start building themselves autonomously using loops and a Hermes-like scheduler before I focused on marketing. This is almost complete.

For marketing, we are building a GTM engine using an open-source CRM (Twenty). We have LLMs use the Twenty CRM API to bring in leads from X, LinkedIn, and the Web.

The cloud hosting is not the only monetization. We’re going to use these open-source SaaS to build a decentralized, interoperable marketplace where the people actually bring value, the sellers, can sell without those rent-seeking entities like Amazon taking a piece of every sale. LLMs are already going to start jumping across these marketplace moats.

The other monetization is going to be letting agents actually run these SaaS and see if they run a business autonomously. Like VendBench but an actual online business. I’m thinking of starting a designer brand, connecting to a POD (print on demand) and then let the agent create seasonal lines, handle customer service, and make sure orders are going to the POD and being processed. Doing this with restaurants and other verticals will probably need some human supervision.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#264

Post by WhatIsDukkha »

simonw wrote: post #175
deaux wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

Which harness software were you using for this 2 years ago? VS Code Copilot? Cursor?

Aider for me

Very successful by just being careful and walking it forward.

Yes its about 2 years, August 2024 from git it looks like.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#266

Post by mgh95 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #263
Schiendelman wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got booked revenue for any of those verticals, using your system?

Yes we have provided custom storefronts for people running the SaaS on-prem and we have a handful of people using our cloud hosting. This is all without any marketing efforts and word of mouth. Albeit, we launched the Shopify alternative in Dec 2025 and the Toast alternative in May 2026. The gym and grocery ones in the works. My main goal is to first get all of these open-source alternatives to start building themsel…

Interesting. Where is this product located? If I'm looking at your profile correctly, this appears to be Openship[1], which is just a collection of starter templates from something from Nextjs and something called Keystone for each vertical. Is this what it is you are talking about?

I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating.

[1] https://github.com/openshiporg

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#267

Post by [deleted] »

_pdp_ wrote: post #229
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.

Agents already run unsupervised, and they can code unsupervised too. The real question is what worthwhile work we should point these capabilities at. Nobody has really cracked that yet.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#268

Post by loeg »

> said a review of a recent data security incident with the company's controversial mouse-tracking software indicated that no employee data was included in AI training.

That's... not quite right. The employee data is used in AI training and is intended to be used this way. But despite not correctly ACLing the data for a couple weeks, it is believed it was not accessed inappropriately.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#269

Post by jknoepfler »

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…

Ick. Stop.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#270

Post by loeg »

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.

Having used them all, the Meta model is weaker than flagship models (OpenAI/Anthropic).
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