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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

#171

Post by deaux »

supern0va wrote: post #148
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 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…

> at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful

I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#172

Post by steveBK123 »

skybrian wrote: post #160
vishalkundar wrote: post #102

The gap between "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" is way bigger than people realize. A chatbot can be wrong 10% of the time and still help you. An agent that's wrong 10% of the time is sending bad emails and making wrong API calls with no one checking.

I see this as the gap between an general-purpose agent and a coding agent. A coding agent can imagine something to be true, test it, discover that it's wrong, and recover. But if you go beyond what can be tested easily, asking the agent to do real work rather than writing a patch, imagining things to be true is a problem.

This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks.

Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot.

If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations.

Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of ability to screw that up and just seems ripe for fraud / being picked off by bad actors.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#173

Post by simonw »

This is a thinner TechCrunch rewrite of this Reuters story: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-z...

The exact quote appears to be:

> In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Hard to guess exactly what he means by "trajectory of the agentic development" but my best guess is that he means that Meta's own internal efforts to improve the agent (aka longer form tool-using) capabilities of their own in-house models hasn't improved to the point that they can drive an agent harness like Codex or Claude Code in a comparable manner to the best OpenAI and Anthropic models.

At a further guess, that was part of their goal in reassigning large numbers of employees to help label data for their AI efforts.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#174

Post by Syzygies »

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…

> I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds.

The 2017 Rohingya massacre in Myanmar? They handed him the death toll. He filed it under growth.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#175

Post by simonw »

deaux wrote: post #171
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…

> at this time last year I couldn't even get Claude (using Cursor) to spin me up a service skeleton that would compile, let alone do anything meaningful I've been using it to do this for 2 years now. And many people with me. The change you mention is one of is primarily one of Overton windows, of vibes.

Which harness software were you using for this 2 years ago? VS Code Copilot? Cursor?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#176

Post by PaulHoule »

ilaksh wrote: post #140
PaulHoule wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uncompetit…

That makes sense in a way, but remember that Meta had previously seen some brief developer glory in the initial Llama release. Going the off-the-shelf route would essentially be giving up on being on the technology frontier in this area, and not monetizing their knowledge assets.

The most effective use of that knowledge might be feeding it into RAG instead of feeding into the base of the pyramid.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#177

Post by steveBK123 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #172
skybrian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as the gap between an general-purpose agent and a coding agent. A coding agent can imagine something to be true, test it, discover that it's wrong, and recover. But if you go beyond what can be tested easily, asking the agent to do real work rather than writing a patch, imagining things to be true is a problem.

This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks. Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot. If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations. Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of abili…

To reply to myself here..

I can STILL replicate this behavior in Google AI summaries 10% of the time:

"is ok for cats"

to which it replies: "Yes, is toxic for cats"

The other one going around this weekend: "how long hot dogs on grill"

Summary: "The hot dogs on your grill are likely around 5-6 inches long .. "

So scale this category of error to unsupervised agents with access to your credit card.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#178

Post by skybrian »

mattas wrote: post #159

There's a disconnect between measured productivity and "anecdotal" productivity. I love this chart because it also demonstrates one of the most effective ways to increase productivity: simply reducing the workforce. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Output per worker is the formal definition of productivity, but that doesn't mean we should assume fixed output.

Under conditions of scarcity, it's usually beneficial to increase output or to produce different kinds of output. At least, if someone will pay for it.

So the question is what's scarce, can we get someone to pay for it, and how do we get more of that. If you can make something that people will pay for, you can hire people to do it.

Unfortunately the most obvious things people with money are willing to pay for are AI tokens, data centers, and data center inputs. It's unclear how this gets us more of other things we want.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#179

Post by lanstin »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #104
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...

The idea that users wanted AI was always a fantasy. Especially for Meta's products. The whole hype cycle has been pure delusion. Just like the Metaverse hype cycle before it.

I think this is the problem for companies with a single person atop - when the company needs things they aren’t good at, the company cannot respond effectively. Zuckerberg was good at running a company to sell ads on an addictive platform; whether that will make him good at the next ten years of profitable tech innovation is difficult to see; people hate ads and dislike the addictions, so Anthropic or whom ever has to walk a different path; they have multiple smart people working together to find that path; Meta does not seem to have that collective vision of competing experts to draw on.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#180

Post by codemog »

paytonjjones wrote: post #133
darth_avocado wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than that, I think people overestimate how much AI will progress as you throw more compute at it. It’s the “9 women can’t deliver a baby in a month” equivalent of AI. Additional compute won’t magically give you AGI.

Maybe not AGI, but if you look at the differences between, say, GPT-2 and GPT 5.5, it's remarkable how well it works to mostly just throw scale at the problem.

They already tried that with GPT-4 and GPT-4.5

They were allegedly massive but the cost and returns were not worth it.

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