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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

#291

Post by theturtletalks »

mgh95 wrote: post #284
theturtletalks wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s built on the shoulders of giants, Next.js[0] and lesser-known Keystone.js[1]. Next is a full stack framework and Keystone is a CMS built on top of Prisma and GraphQL. Keystone was created by this Australian company called Thinkmill. They have used it to help businesses build custom backend systems for more than a decade. But it needed to be deployed separately from Next and they were using emotion css for t…

First I know what next is. Its standard enough. Second, take this for what it is: your product may not be compelling in its current form. Building it to many different markets will not make it compelling. If you had a stronger revenue, please share it. This sounds incredibly thin. Third, dont mistake building the same thing 20 times for different verticals for bonifide software skills. When a SWE builds the thing the…

Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are.

In the end, I built Openship and Openfront for my e-commerce business and then turned them into SaaS. All the revenue for these are just a cherry on top of our existing e-commerce businesses.

And I worked with Next and Keystone long before AI came along. Check my GitHub commits if you need some back story.

And I’m not building these 20 SaaS to prove I have bonafide SWE skills. I’m building them because I plan to have my own gyms, hotels, grocery stores down the line powered by these SaaS. SWE to me a means to an end and that’s to have many different businesses.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#292

Post by paytonjjones »

emp17344 wrote: post #234
paytonjjones wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your timeline is a bit backwards: they were given trillions of dollars only after they'd demonstrated a few pretty remarkable advancements.

The fact that their advancement suggested that pouring more compute would continue working was also especially attractive to investors: it made a massive R&D budget feel like less of a risk.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#293

Post by sroerick »

darth_avocado wrote: post #107
_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.

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.

The Allegorical Agent Aeon

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#294

Post by chicken-stew »

Aperocky wrote: post #290
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…

If you end up with 2 to 3 times more code. That is HORRIBLE, because it means about 50-66% of the code is otherwise unnecessary. Those are eventually going to become unmaintainable garbage. However, if you get 2 to 3 times the code in the interim, that's probably less than what's needed. I find myself cycle through almost 10x-20x amount of code implementations to get what I want which is actually less code, simple so…

“How many Kloc did you submit today? I did 12.”

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#295

Post by mkozlows »

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 kinda love that you made this post feel negative enough that a bunch of AI skeptics are enthusiastically agreeing with a post suggesting that the realistic, pragmatic bear case for AI is, uh, 2-3x productivity improvements.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#296

Post by esperent »

zdragnar wrote: post #272
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.

I was under the impression that the deltas between versions were shrinking- i.e. gpt 4 -> 5 was much less impactful than 3 -> 4 or 2 -> 3. If the growth is getting diminishing returns, I can't say I'm optimistic without finding a drastically different approach.

GPT 4/5 etc. are just marketing names though.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#297

Post by wonnage »

blcknight wrote: post #109
vishalkundar wrote: post #102

The gap between "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" is way bigger than people realize. A chatbot can be wrong 10% of the time and still help you. An agent that's wrong 10% of the time is sending bad emails and making wrong API calls with no one checking.

The gulf is bridgeable. The problem is that a lot of people are building agents without strong enough judgment layers around them. Work that can be verified with reasonable accuracy are the sweet spot right now.

This is much harder than it sounds. Most techniques I’ve seen end up using separate agents to do the planning, implementation, and judging.

The elaborate workarounds you have to build to help an agent which fundamentally doesn’t know what it’s doing reminds me of this old blog post about TDD: https://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-...

IMO present technology is tailored for an experienced developer to give agents manageable tasks that can be one-shot. The marketing right now reminds me of the 90s when AskJeeves promised natural language search when the technology was fundamentally still stuck in keyword search, and learning to craft a search query for Google is today’s prompt engineering

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#298

Post by fhe »

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…

Yes, this... all the hype from the leading AI companies just pattern-matched so many past cases where things didn't pan out. really giving me the bad vibes..

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#299

Post by pokstad »

_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.

That's assuming that LLMs aren't approaching some asymptote that doesn't cross over to AGI.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#300

Post by root_axis »

1attice wrote: post #210
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the bigco IMO. I'm not sure what kind of layoff numbers for Year Three of genAI would grab your attention, but I assure you, hundreds of thousands have mine.

The layoffs started years before LLMs became practical coding tools.
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