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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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strongly suspect that developers moving from writing code to managing agents to write code for them is very similar to developers moving into leadership and management roles and managing ICs to write code for them. Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well a…

I think you are confusing manager with ICs. Managers don't really read or review the codes. What you are describing is where agents are doing all the coding and reviewing without people in the loop. I don't think the op is working with the code as black box. He is more about describing the higher IC workflow. Whether we still need people in the coding loop is not a trivial difference

Managers don't really read or review the codes.

Good ones do. Reading the code someone is contributing is a powerful signal about how well they're doing.

ICs who manage swarms of agents should operate the same way. They set them off to do something, and then look at the output to see if it's going well.

That's the point I'm making here: managing a team of ICs and managing a swarm of agents has a lot of overlap in the systems and processes you can use to see if it's working well. By teaching ICs to be better managers I think they'd get better at using agentic AI.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#342
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Apple Intelligence has been a boondoggle. Siri has been consistently 3+ years behind in capabilities compared to even open source equivalents. Feels less like the pace of foundation model development and more so a specific failure of one organization to do something important.

Bad capabilities but maybe less wrong output? All the funny memes of Google explaining some fake aphorism is t really something Apple product would go for. Successful navigation of technology over the decades requires some timing finesse. I don’t know.

Siri fails simple tasks often, I don't know about less wrong output.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 strongly suspect that developers moving from writing code to managing agents to write code for them is very similar to developers moving into leadership and management roles and managing ICs to write code for them. Some devs just 'get it' and thrive, leading a team really well a…

Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.

The bit I don't have evidence for is whether or not teaching ICs to be managers would improve how they use agentic AI. I have plenty of evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of AI itself (although not qualitative or obviously causal unfortunately.)

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. We are beset on all sides with companies declaring agentic coding a failure and here you are stating as a matter of fact some teams “thrive” with this probabilistic expensive approach to approximating working code? All the while concluding with “I have no evidence for any of this”.

The bit I don't have evidence for is whether or not teaching ICs to be managers would improve how they use agentic AI. I have plenty of evidence for the efficacy and effectiveness of AI itself (although not qualitative or obviously causal unfortunately.)

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Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#346

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

Just because he fails publicly sometimes does not mean he only makes bad decisions. Facebook is still incredibly successful. The market may apply a Zuckerberg discount compared to other tech companies, but that is not the same thing as saying he has been a bad operator.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#347
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed they were. Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)

Yeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.

I always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#348
post #329

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

I don't like Zuckerberg at all but Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were _very_ good calls

Sure, they worked out pretty well, but those were 12 and 14 years ago at this point, and aren't the only calls Facebook has made over the years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

IMO the actual prescient call he made early on is to hang on to 60% of the total voting power of the company. I have to imagine there are several points where he'd have been pushed out quite a while ago if he hadn't have done that.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#349

Zuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.

And the guy will never ever be laid off by the board while he lays off thousands and tens of thousands each time he fails and loses billions

All thanks to Silicon Valley's ridiculous stock structures

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.

I always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.

MySpace gave users a lot of freedom. That was great in certain scenarios but at it got bigger it meant there was just more noise and the general atmosphere was very messy for lack of a better word. Facebook was very clean by comparison and it felt natural to connect to people who couldn't handle MySpace, people in your family or at work etc. Then eventually it got big enough through that that it just became the place to connect with your cool friends too because "everyone" was there.

So yeah, it's kinda mixed. The core product was cool but it wasn't as suitable for as a replacement for the phone book in the way Facebook was.

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