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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

#391

Post by PUSH_AX »

SwellJoe wrote: post #319

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 still he somehow keeps getting richer.

Just a stab in the dark, but it's likely because FB and meta are wildly successful businesses, and it's almost impossible to attribute that to one "lucky" event at the inception of the business.

If I'm being honest I'm actually kind of shocked at the engagement this comment is getting and the fact it's still visible. Like him or not, if you're capable of being objective, he is doing the opposite of failing...

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#393

Post by guenthert »

gloryjulio wrote: post #320
onion2k wrote: post #315

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.

There's such and such. In some companies, the leaf engineers report to a team lead, which might or might not be granted this 'manager' title. Those poor fellows essentially doing double-duty and are the most likely candidates for burn-out.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#394

Post by diffeomorphism »

m00x wrote: post #321
hatefulheart wrote: post #318

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”.

Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be. We learned that some tasks don't really benefit from AI while others do. My team went from 7 people to 2 (went to new teams, no layoffs), and we're doing the same amount if not more work than we used to. Is it more draining and lacking of focused work? Yes. Is it more money for the business? Yes.

Being a "failure" means it fails to meet its success criteria.

If you claim 10x and deliver 3x, that is a failure. The 3x may still be impressive or a gamechanger or ..., but it still falls short of its promises.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#395

Post by Laurel1234 »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #46
shimman wrote: post #4

Can't think of a better poster child of complete corporate waste that benefits no one whose assets should be seized and redistributed to the masses. For the amount that Meta wastes on LLM spending you can pay for things like universal childcare, public community college, and providing free lunch to all public students. If you care about things like money, look up the dollar returns on feeding children during their de…

How much of your money do you spend on paying for kids school lunches, paying medical bills of terminally ill kids and paying off the student loans of graduates? It's very easy to say that someone/some oeganization's wealth should be confiscated, yet I have yet to see those proposing it actually putting any of their own money where their mouth is.

> How much of your money do you spend on paying for kids school lunches, paying medical bills of terminally ill kids and paying off the student loans of graduates?

A third of my salary each month.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#396

Post by pydry »

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…

>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.

Social media is flooded with bots pushing this narrative - coding is dead, engineers are all cooked, the latest model is scarily good, "what am I for?", etc.

A good rule of thumb is that if it's a human being and not a bot, they'll use the word "slop" at some point.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#397

Post by Laurel1234 »

rchaud wrote: post #40
alkyon wrote: post #8

I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?

Gubernatorial run in California.

I think the reanimated corpse of Hitler endorsed by the reanimated corpse of Epstein would get more votes than the Zucc.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#398

Post by Laurel1234 »

jrockway wrote: post #91
dofm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or: you wasted too much money on failing to replace yourselves so now I have to lay you off. Which is one of the two possible grand outcomes of the AI bubble, which both result in laying people off, because that is all these companies know how to do as a response to stress.

I am not sure that it has to be so zero sum. The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless. My current feeling is that it's a powerful tool I'm happy to pay to use; it doesn't replace me, but it makes it easier to do higher quality work. It feels a lot like IntelliSense, or faster compilers, or getting a 32" moni…

LLMs are genuinely useful tools if used as such and not some magic people replacer.

I do wonder if their provided utility will still justify the cost once the bubble pops and frontier models aren't subsidized money furnaces, though.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#399

Post by Gareth321 »

ifwinterco wrote: post #331
thisisit wrote: post #283

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. Amara’s law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. This continues to be applied to AI where people…

I believe this in general but the issue with AI specifically is historically in every cycle we've overestimated the potential of AI in both the short and the long run - people in the 60s were genuinely quite convinced we were close to AGI for a few years, as ridiculous as that now sounds. This is why you get "AI winters" but we've never had a "steam engine winter" or a "railway winter" or a "petrochemicals winter"

It's interesting to score our predictions of various technologies. I've been waiting for hoverboards for 40 years. Our predictions of nuclear power being in every consumer appliance were way off. We just couldn't make it safe and cheap enough. This is a common theme for "physical" technologies. On the other hand, we greatly underestimated the advent and potential of the internet. Most science fiction of the 20th century envisioned very large computers with limited interconnected capabilities. We made computers far smarter and more ubiquitous than most could ever have conceived. I see AI as a function of the kinds of technologies we consistently underestimate.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#400

Post by fsuts »

earthnail wrote: post #360
bayarearefugee wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

But if you take the same perspective as a VC: 95% of your bets can fail if the other 5% are spectacular. He made spectacular bets with Instagram and WhatsApp. Most CEOs don’t make spectacular bets because their business doesn’t allow it, meaning the VC analogy doesn’t hold for them.

Hasn’t Meta failed to monetise WhatsApp?

So it may be popular but they have ultimately failed commercially so far. They just bought an Indian startup and immediately put the founder in charge of WhatsApp.

Only this week they announced WhatsApp would allow usernames rather than rely on phone numbers. All the other competitors apps (signal,telegram etc) did this years ago.

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