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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

#441

Post by alex1138 »

tchalla wrote: post #382
pavlov wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very HN comment... At the time, almost nobody felt spending billions acquiring these companies was "elementary". Instagram was bought so early that spending a billion on a startup was unheard of. And WhatsApp was so expensive that they questioned Zuck's sanity. You mention two strategic enablers that made these unusual acquisitions seem obvious to FB leadership. So were those two not good calls?

The parent comment is referring to a “VPN” installed by Facebook on users phone that surreptitiously sent telemetry data to Facebook. No one else had that information.

And also even if they never had Onavo you have Zuck furiously backpedaling in an email about I'm not saaaaaaaying we should acquire IG to wipe them out from the landscape of competition, but........

And then you have the WA founder (Acton) famously saying delete facebook

Some acquisitions make the product better or are altruistic. Zuck's war chest isn't one of them

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#442

Post by Aeolun »

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.

> Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be.

It’s absolutely 10x faster for coding. But coding is only 10% of my job. The other 90% is figuring out what to code.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#443

Post by entrope »

noosphr wrote: post #408
Tenoke wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring aircraft production per weight doesnt sound like that bad of a proxy. If I hear that Boeing produced 300 kilotons worth of aircrafts more this year, I'd be right to suspect they've ramped up production.

Every day we stray further into depravity and barbarism.

I think you're overlooking the lesson of Goodhart's law: you can use a metric, but if you make it a target, it stops being a good metric. Neither "tons of aircraft" nor "lines of code" should be the measuring stick -- and if they're not, then they can still be used as metrics.

To be fair, the hazard with AI agents is that they generate fluent output that is often facile, so it's easy to do a lot of things while having a lot of defects. That's a sign that quality control is not prioritized enough. A change in quality will also reduce the utility of SLOC as a metric, but the mechanism is different than what Charles Good hart pointed out.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#444

Post by ben_w »

hahahaa wrote: post #440
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 agree there is a skill change but agents aren't people so managing them is very different. E.g. you can spin up 1000 agents. Get them inti tight loops and get them more context and so on. A manager doesn't do that with people.

Agents aren't people, but they anthropomorphise themselves real hard.

> E.g. you can spin up 1000 agents. Get them inti tight loops and get them more context and so on. A manager doesn't do that with people.

My dad had various work stories, one from when he interviewed applicants:

  "So, why did you leave your last job?"

  "After 6 months, the management discovered my entire floor and the one next to it had been hired to do the same task. One of the floors had to go, I got unlucky."

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#445

Post by hatefulheart »

ben_w wrote: post #434
andrewaylett wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is: I could produce 2-3 times as much code as before _without_ an LLM, if I didn't care about my colleagues' ability to review my output properly. Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.

> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. > A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time. Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, sm…

Survivorship bias, you don’t know of all the failed projects that couldn’t get off the ground because of incompetent development team and practices that lead a product to its demise, or a product that is possible within constraints that otherwise could have been a success, but not realised by sloppy work and incompetence.

Furthermore the dependencies you choose to build your product are presumably filtered for engineering practices or world class engineers. So given the choice you yourself prefer top quality engineering, so do your customers. Much in the same way you are a customer of your projects dependencies. Difference being, as developers we get to see how the sausage is made, our customers only see second and third order effects.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#446

Post by Planktonne »

onion2k wrote: post #416
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I disagree. From ICs that I lead, I expect that they learn fast. On the other hand, LLMs are basically incapable of improving. Another issue that I can see is that I don't particularly like eager new c…

New colleagues can be taught that, LLMs not so. LLMs can be 'taught' though. You can give them additional context or instructions. The difference is that they can't really teach themselves. This is roughly what I'm saying - someone who's managing an IC can steer them on the right course, and someone who's managing an agent can also steer it on the right course, so teaching someone how to handle ICs well gives them sk…

> LLMs can be 'taught' though. You can give them additional context or instructions.

That's not teaching. Giving someone new information in the moment does not amount to giving them new long-term capabilities.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#447

Post by preisschild »

ben_w wrote: post #434
andrewaylett wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is: I could produce 2-3 times as much code as before _without_ an LLM, if I didn't care about my colleagues' ability to review my output properly. Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time.

> Lines of code are a liability, not an asset. You want as few of them as you can get away with, without compromising the actual asset: the functionality. > A huge part of the job of Software Engineering is producing the right amount of code at the right time. Absolutely true, however my experience says that the correlation between "good software engineering practices" and "positive business outcomes" is, at best, sm…

Good point. In my experience even hobby free software projects are generally better engineered than most proprietary software sold by businesses

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#448

Post by ben_w »

Aeolun wrote: post #442
m00x wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Agentic coding is absolutely not a failure. It's just not the 10x that CEOs really wanted it to be. It’s absolutely 10x faster for coding. But coding is only 10% of my job. The other 90% is figuring out what to code.

From my experience with daily stand-ups, I think they can be a significant boost to that, too. Though you will absolutely have to wear a manager hat with their estimates and breakdowns, not just fire-and-forget, as they're often as not wildly over-optimistic about task complexity.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#449

Post by ben_w »

hatefulheart wrote: post #432
hlynurd wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can both be a wild success and not what he expected.

These two not mutually exclusive? “Wild success” and “going slower than expected”? Wake me up when words have a meaning again.

> These two not mutually exclusive?

Correct, they are not.

Consider: Someone who "expects" their bank account to have $100M in it before they turn 30 and "only" gets it to $10M.

From the point of view of a normal sane person, they are experiencing "wild success", and yet at the same time they are definitely "going slower than [they] expected".

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#450

Post by tsukikage »

input_sh wrote: post #380
zkmon wrote: post #307

> he expects that the social media giant will begin to experience more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months. He is hallucinating just like AI, and unable to come to terms with the facts on the ground. Meta has lost plot about 5 years back - with metaverse, VR, glasses and AI. They should sit back and think with a calm head, about what exactly their core product is. Unfortun…

> ...about what exactly their core product is. It's ads. They have an infinite money glitch called ads, allowing them to waste billions chasing other pipe dreams. The fact that so many of those pipe dreams turned into nothing doesn't hurt them one bit.

It's how venture capital works: the theory is that you invest in a dozen pie-in-the-sky pipedreams, almost all of them fail, and the one that doesn't pays for the rest. If you're not failing most of the time, you're not taking on enough risk.
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