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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

#401

Post by noosphr »

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…

Measuring software performance by lines of code is like measuring aircraft performance by weight.

I have no idea why everyone seems to have forgotten this simple fact over the last four years.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#402

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.

Think that means 95% of bets over a small period of time? (A single fund within the VC) as opposed to the whole VC since inception.

And so not comparable.

VC investing is also a tax write off for rich investors which is offset against their gains elsewhere, wasted company money is a loss for the share buyer.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#403

Post by websap »

onion2k wrote: post #315
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 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 disagree with your 2nd assertion. Even engineers who are less tech lead style engineers, can gain a significant boost in productivity by being able to quickly run through POCs and build an understanding of surrounding areas of their work, so they are able to contribute more.

For eg I am able to make React changes much faster and the changes are higher quality, given frontend dev has never been my job role. I’m able to spin up test harnesses, write throw away glue code, test against large datasets, etc

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#404

Post by sirwhinesalot »

onion2k wrote: post #315
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 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 get why you think this but you are incorrect. Why? Because managing a team of people is very very different from managing outsourced contractors, and LLMs are much more like the latter than the former.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#405

Post by ifwinterco »

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…

Yes, that's a fair counterpoint. I guess my counter-counterpoint would be that LLMs actually seem to have characteristics closer to the first group than the second, in that they (currently at least) need enormous quantities of physical things and energy in order to work.

So the nuclear power problem of "it works fine and it's actually very good in a lot of ways, it's just too expensive" could be quite relevant

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#406

Post by noosphr »

IshKebab wrote: post #379
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.

How do you know though? People thought ANNs and perceptrons were basically useless until pretty much around the time of AlexNet and while there were some architectural improvements (CNNs, transformers), the biggest thing that changed was that we simply threw more compute at it. It's definitely too early to declare that more compute won't make a difference.

It was data. Alexnet worked because imagenet existed. It took less than a year between the dataset becoming public and the first version of Alexnet being trained.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#407

Post by Tenoke »

noosphr wrote: post #401
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…

Measuring software performance by lines of code is like measuring aircraft performance by weight. I have no idea why everyone seems to have forgotten this simple fact over the last four years.

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.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#408

Post by noosphr »

Tenoke wrote: post #407
noosphr wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measuring software performance by lines of code is like measuring aircraft performance by weight. I have no idea why everyone seems to have forgotten this simple fact over the last four years.

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.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#409

Post by KptMarchewa »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #394
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.

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.

So what? Who cares about such a binary claims?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#410

Post by Tenoke »

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…

Have you honestly not noticed how dried up the tech job market is? This take is bizzare to me.
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