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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

#501

Post by rh94 »

everdrive wrote: post #484
andreygrehov wrote: post #476

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

I don't like Zuckerberg whatsoever, but there are plenty of reasons you could potentially care about his opinion: - He could be well-placed to see whether AI agent development is successful since at a high level he oversees much of it, and will be getting detailed metrics and things. - Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies.…

My thoughts exactly. I think he is well positioned to see edge of ai tech as the money he spent (if allocated well) could give him bit more insights. Although questionoble how much he is still able with his background to understand, I don’t think he is as much engineer as he was used to be

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#502

Post by [deleted] »

hatefulheart wrote: post #445
ben_w wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engine…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#503

Post by ben_w »

hatefulheart wrote: post #445
ben_w wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 engine…

> Survivorship bias

The statistical problem is small sample size, not survivorship bias, as I got to see things before failure. These two examples are merely illustrative of things I've seen.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#504

Post by KellyCriterion »

tmule wrote: post #497
throw-qqqqq wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher Perhaps he employs some, you know, to inform him on the topic?

The same folks who informed him about how awesome Behemoth was?

...and the same people who informed him about this Metaverse-Trend-thingy :-D

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#505

Post by throw4847285 »

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…

In my experience, it's the opposite. People who become dependent on AI agents are avoiding human contact, and people who become managers are seeking it out (for better or worse).

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#506

Post by geriatricguy »

andreygrehov wrote: post #476

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

The cold hard reality is that, despite the attempt at creating a cult of personality around the man, he's far further along his journey of computer science than being a php dev from 2 decades ago. Boiling down his credentials to being simply a dev from a bygone era is hilarious

On that note, does anyone have the authority to speak about AI agents that would satisfy your requirements? It's not exactly quantum chromodynamics, it's glorified automation that costs a lot more and does it poorly.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#507

Post by happyPersonR »

andreygrehov wrote: post #476

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

The most correct opinion

No disrespect to anyone that worked or works at meta:

We can build a better version of his whole platform in 30 mins.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#508

Post by KptMarchewa »

richiebful1 wrote: post #470
KptMarchewa wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Directionally, that's why companies are getting rid of token leaderboards and imposing limits on LLM costs. There's a diminishing marginal return to tokens

That's true and it's also very easy to game.

There is increase in (not only perceived) value _somewhere_ - IMO depends on the organizational culture. At my work I found going over 100$ on OpenAI/Anthropic's API pricing does not produce any meaningful additional output. It might be much different in different companies.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#509

Post by eiifr1 »

epolanski wrote: post #472
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.

I think that coding reviews are no longer feasible as they used to. The pace and expectations have increased and a human can barely cope with reviewing its own code, let alone colleagues'. They are not going to disappear in critical aspects of a codebase, nor shouldn't, but the industry will eventually reward self sufficient individuals able to keep the pace, harness and run adversarial reviews against the design and…

[flagged]

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#510

Post by eiifr1 »

baq wrote: post #487
hatefulheart wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing, just like I’ve been checking back on people over the last 3 years. I’ll hit you up too.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. We're riding an exponential here for Pete's sake.

These all sound like nice sound bites.

Until you factor in many large firms are interested in cheap Chinese models.

Are you a frontier lab booster by any chance?

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