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Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

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Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#581
post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a popular CEO? They're generally untrustworthy people.

Steve Jobs was. Elon Musk is. Outside of tech Warren Buffett seems popular.

I don't know what the baseline is for CEO popularity (I guess most people don't know that many CEOs by name?) but I'd be hard-pressed to call a 37/50 favorable/unfavorable ratio popular: https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#582

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 chromody…

Nice take, but aside from all this, I think he could whoop Elon's butt in a fight.. lol

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#583
post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does "runs" actually mean? zoom calls from his private Hawai island to a bunch of buddies other C-level execs?

It means he has a controlling share over the money and all the power. This thread is bizarre. He can run the day to day string pulling however he wants, he is literally the one with all the power.

Trump, Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, Biden, and Bankman-Fried all have or had a lot of power, and I would look to none of them if I wanted to get a better understanding of reality. If anything, I expect this kind of skin in the game to be strongly anticorrelated with providing useful takes; these are the people with the greatest incentives to mislead the public.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, is there a single successful large investment made by Meta recently ? I just know about the abject failures :)

llama has been generally useful.

for "the rest of us" building certain kinds of systems on top of it.

as integrated into Meta's platforms it is clearly uncompetitive as a consumer chatbot with the likes of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.

Like the other chatbots give me useful answers to questions even if they're wrong sometimes. Meta AI, on the other hand, cracks jokes about my foxwork. That's no so bad because sketch comedy is one of the foxwork skill areas (e.g. if I get you to laugh you are under my spell) but it's not useful and edifying the way competitors are.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#585
post #171

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.

Yeah, I strongly remember getting Sonnet 3.5 with Aider to boostrap an (albeit basic) project and getting it to work. Especially vivid because I told my roommate at the time about it and he also tried it out and was also shocked. I'd put maybe $20 in credits into the API haha. Feels so quaint, it's almost a foregone conclusion with the current models and harnesses.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#586

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.

> He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook

Nice summary of a good hacker's viewpoint. All his money, power, and other non-technical signals don't really give him the technical authority to weigh on what really makes a technical difference.

That being said, depending on how good information-sharing is at the company, he might have a valuable perspective. But given that morale is low, it's doubtful that engineers feel free to tell the straight unvarnished truth without fear. And in typical large-company fashion, managers above them likely spin things positively as much as possible.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#587

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.

Unfortunately all that money also made React and Next.js a reality.

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

llama has been generally useful.

for "the rest of us" building certain kinds of systems on top of it. as integrated into Meta's platforms it is clearly uncompetitive as a consumer chatbot with the likes of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini. Like the other chatbots give me useful answers to questions even if they're wrong sometimes. Meta AI, on the other hand, cracks jokes about my foxwork. That's no so bad because sketch comedy is one…

Ok, I'll bite. What's "foxwork"?

Re: Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 insig…

>Many developers are too focused on delivery value compared to maintenance cost. The way this is worded feels like it leaves the blame on developers. Aren't these developers focused on exactly what they are being judged by? Shouldn't we say it is the management who is too focused on delivery value compared to maintenance cost? Is it the developer's job to guide management or the manager's job to request guidance, ass…

I don't think so, my experience is that most often falls into two scenarios:

1) The devs pushing for more complex solutions, covering obscure edge case scenarios, feature-creep, "future-architecturing" because they are more interesting to implement. Classic over-engineering problems.

2) The features the managers actually want are usually boring or annoying to implement and the devs just work around any big architectural problems caused by the feature delivery.

1 is 100% on the devs, 2 it varies wildly, the willingness to address architectural problems are often under pressure by time-delivery estimates from managers. But many devs (especially in companies with low morale) will often just work around issues because addressing the underlying problems can be very difficult and/or time consuming.

Meaning either the dev wants to do the right thing but doesn't have the time, or the dev doesn't care enough and just pushes the tech debt down to the future (when hopefully they will be at another job).

LLMs makes both problems significantly worse, although they are also often very helpful with the big restructurings mentioned in 2. The dev can still be lazy and the deadline can still be too tight even with that extra LLM help.

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