Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected • Hacker News Board

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#121

Post by skeledrew » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

I think there are seriously misplaced expectations here. The primary role of AI is transference of effort, while "increased productivity" is just a side-effect (since computers are so much faster than humans at highly repetitive tasks). It's about not having to directly do X anymore (or as often), even though it may take a few rounds to get X to a satisfactory point. But even if following up is needed, most of the effort budget can then be used for Y.

Also those with very heavy investment in AI are looking for bonkers results, which is the cause of their disappointment. They need to reduce their expectations. I for one am loving the results so far.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#122

Post by alt227 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

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 have experienced and feel very much the same, and it is refreshing to see a realistic post about the success of agentic coding instead of the usual hype or doom.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#123

Post by adam12 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

Maybe they'd make faster progress if they worked in the Metaverse.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#124

Post by appplication » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

GCA10 wrote: post #108

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, i don't think it is the core problem. Meta doesn't seem to be able to produce anything close to a frontier model. The selling of compute capacity seems to be acceptance of "compute is wasted on this crappy avocado model, we'd be better off allowing something better to run". The problem is clearly in the model architecture, the training and the data fed into the model which is causing them to give up on using…

Meta has made some very strange decisions in terms of who it's hired to lead various aspects of AI, including the model-building efforts. Also lots to marvel at re: its ability to coordinate (or not coordinate) various efforts by all these big brains. Can't help but think that Meta's digital networking expertise is built atop a human-networking clusterf*ck

I was never really sold their acquihire of Alexandr Wang as their head of AI being a coherent strategic decision. I just don’t see how his experience and background actually applies for frontier LLM model building.

I think there would easily be a few other hundred engineers and execs at frontier labs who are more in the loop for cutting edge architecture/secret sauce - with a track record of actually doing it - that could be had for a fraction of the price.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#125

Post by abirch » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:29 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #85

I wonder when he'll admit his hopes were baseless

right after he stops trying to steal everyone's privacy. Not only on the internet but IRL too with those Meta Raybans

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#126

Post by skeledrew » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

_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.

Bonkers compute only in the beginning. Over time it'll reduce as models are made more efficient.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#127

Post by dofm » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #101

laweijfmvo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Meta’s massive compute investment was never about its 100,000 engineers running coding models, but its 3,500,000,000 users wanting to use AI in every single product (and some new ones: Meta AI, glasses, etc.) So I would think that’s the part that’s not being utilized anywhere near the amount they hoped...

Do the 3.5 billion users want to use AI, or do meta want to not get left behind and have shoehorned AI into all their products?

Literally the only value the Facebook AI provides is amusement when the suggestions are so comically wrong/off-colour/surreal etc.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#128

Post by MattDamonSpace » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

_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.

Altman was trying to get $1T of infra investment years ago

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#129

Post by PaulHoule » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #103

My instinct (for better or worse) is usually contrarian. Most people seem very skeptical of what Meta is doing with AI. But, what if, in a way at least, it makes sense? Maybe Wang has correctly identified that the programming and agentic ability that Anthropic and OpenAI models have has largely come from armies of software engineers creating massive datasets by writing out coding and agentic problems and solutions? S…

One problem is that the AI agent market is fiercely competitive. Why build when you can buy? For the foreseeable future there will be a number of competitive models on the "efficient frontier" and I don't think one vendor will pull ahead.

In that market you can build a model and spend a lot of money on it and at best get something that's on the same frontier as everybody else but just as likely end up with uncompetitive models like the ones they have now.

You might save a bit running your own models, doing your own inference, etc. Why not take advantage of "last mover advantage" and buy whatever is best when you need it and figure the odds are good that everybody else is going to buy more GPUs than they need and as a large customer you'll be able to buy in bulk at fire sale prices?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#130

Post by ilaksh » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

winstonp wrote: post #111

ilaksh wrote: post #103

My instinct (for better or worse) is usually contrarian. Most people seem very skeptical of what Meta is doing with AI. But, what if, in a way at least, it makes sense? Maybe Wang has correctly identified that the programming and agentic ability that Anthropic and OpenAI models have has largely come from armies of software engineers creating massive datasets by writing out coding and agentic problems and solutions? S…

While I mostly agree with your post, I do want to point out one thing: > Or he could release a model trained largely by existing open weights models. Which without some huge breakthrough probably has no chance of surpassing them, so is pointless. This seems to be categorically untrue. Composer 2.5 is a substantial improvement on its underlying Kimi base model.

If that is backed up by benchmarks then maybe they should imitate whatever Cursor did. What did they do?

They may eventually have to do that. Or they might be starting with an existing Llama model. Maybe I should have said "huge breakthrough or additional dataset".