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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

#451

Post by AdamN »

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.

Yeah they're a media conglomerate and their customers are advertisers. They have unstoppable traction with Instagram and Whatsapp and a legacy model with Facebook. There really isn't much more to it except that they need to keep trying new things in case those properties get taken down by a competitor.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#452

Post by entrope »

adamddev1 wrote: post #372
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…

Do you mean that to implement the same features, the agents write 2-3 times as much code as a human would write before?

My experience is that AI agents write 20-33% more code than I would for a given feature set, mostly because they are worse at remembering what utility functions already exist and less likely to merge similar functions into more generic ones. They generate that code 2-10 times faster than I could. Defect density is harder to compare: I probably generate more "dumb" defects due to oversight or missing unit tests, but fewer defects that violate domain rules or architectural objectives.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#453

Post by [deleted] »

Gareth321 wrote: post #399
ifwinterco wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cent…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#454

Post by KptMarchewa »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #418
KptMarchewa wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Who cares about such a binary claims?

People making decisions. Pay me 8x to get 10x, great. Pay me 8x to get 3x, nope.

I have not seen reasonable claims that people are paying 8x the salary of a SWE to get those 2-3x results.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#455

Post by rusk »

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…

> Successful product though, wasn't it

If you can call being an “also ran” in a field they had a ten year march on their competitors in success, yeah.

Truth be told it was the shoddy code they were forced to use for the vanity of their paymaster might well have held them back, though manifestly that is not a bad thing. Probably the best outcome, really.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#456

Post by PunchyHamster »

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…

so 3 times more code to maintain in long term too. With no human that actually understands it on staff

I feel like even those benefits gonna melt pretty quickly. It's great as code review buddy tho

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#457

Post by Octoth0rpe »

Miner49er wrote: post #377
Kudos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you assuming Zuck's expectations for progress of _his_ product have anything to do with the impact of that category of product for its users?

Pretty sure Zuck was talking about agents in general, not specifically Meta agents.

More importantly, he's really probably talking about 'superintelligence', rather than just building genuinely useful and monetizable models.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#458

Post by DanielHB »

andrewaylett wrote: post #424
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…

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.

I have been saying this for years, I once had a heated argument about a small system of maybe 1000 lines of code that was technically superior and more scalable but was freaking 1000 lines of code to maintain compared to the quick and dirty 10 lines of code it was suppose to abstract and make generic (for future use of course).

That with also countless debates over insignificant features in frontend apps at the cost of extra code. Frontend code is very susceptible to this maintenance cost dilema.

Many developers are too focused on delivery value compared to maintenance cost. It is unfortunate that non-technical management can see value delivered, but not maintenance cost incurred. With LLM-assisted code this has become many times worse.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#459

Post by penpendian »

lanstin wrote: post #187
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compression can be defined as reducing uncertainty. If you can predict the next sequence you can compress it to 0 bytes using arithmetic coding. Reliable prediction is what enables compression and it's the link between compression and AI that everyone is talking about. No one ever in comp sci says artificial intelligence is "like compression", they correctly state that "artificial intelligence IS compression". It's a…

The factor that is missing in that analysis to me is a time based dynamic stability perspective. Humans have a pretty good ability to go off the rails in reasoning one day and wake up reasonable; a pretty good ability to pursue tasks, despite a multitude of distractions, for ten years or longer. The best models get appreciably worse over a half million tokens. Even using a bunch of limited context agents over time, t…

the things as developer i see no practical gain for us when we should and found model routing better than keep pouring investment into agentic model like, i rather use a smaller faster model with harnessing to do drama script generation instead of leaving it to Fable or Gpt5.5

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#460

Post by another_twist »

andrewaylett wrote: post #424
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…

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.

This is the thing. You "spend" lines of code, you dont produce it. The produced part is the outcome - a functional feature, stability improvements, some business outcome. Measuring productivity with LoCs is like measuring output with cash burn.
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