Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• Can't think of a better poster child of complete corporate waste that benefits no one whose assets should be seized and redistributed to the masses.

  For the amount that Meta wastes on LLM spending you can pay for things like universal childcare, public community college, and providing free lunch to all public students.

  If you care about things like money, look up the dollar returns on feeding children during their development or when you tell families they don't have be an economic burden for simply existing.

  A better world is possible.

  by shimman
• How much of your money do you spend on paying for kids school lunches, paying medical bills of terminally ill kids and paying off the student loans of graduates?

  It's very easy to say that someone/some oeganization's wealth should be confiscated, yet I have yet to see those proposing it actually putting any of their own money where their mouth is.

  by KetoManx64
• I mean, we can call it a voluntary surrender of their networth for the public good. How many school teachers could be funded by splitting and selling his ranch in hawaii
  by Avicebron
• $80 billion written off for the metaverse.

  Think about the number of kids that were harmed being fed ads and nonsense content to enable this... this a scandal IMO.

  by Rebuff5007
• My diagnosis is.. You are working with people. Smart ones at that, who have been working for a very long time in their own, niche, specific way. To assume all engineers will become AI-pilled like you and hop on Claude Code whenever asked is the wrong approach. You can make the greatest tools, but if it doesn't fit in the behaviour and the way of working of the engineer, they will simply discard it.

  I see this issue with clients and prospects all the time. A client's team of 5 produces 1 foobar widget in 2 weeks. That's 50 human days spent. Then, someone demonstrates the same thing can be produced (at an equal ot higher level of quality, mind you) with AI in 2 hours. Management might celebrate but teams will continue programming by hand as they always have, now asking ChatGPT about their build tool errors instead of using Stack Overflow.

  Handing out tools and telling them it's cool is not enough. You'll need to understand, work with, and guide the engineering teams properly step by step. You'll have to change their behaviour. That does not happen overnight. Unfortunately the present approach is to drop the people who don't perform in the new era of AI-assisted software engineering. That is not the right approach in my eyes.

  by philipp-gayret
• 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.
  by andreygrehov
• Be honest, in the counterfactual where he had said that "AI" agents are the next industrial revolution and there is no future for human skills and so on -- would you have still valued his opinion as being effectively worthless?
  by cyphar
• All this is happening because many Silicon Valley CEOs are totally disconnected from humanity. I actually dont think Mark even sees his employees as human beings but rather as training data from a future where AI agents will just replace most of his workforce.

  Regardless of wether this is right or wrong, and not even getting into the correctness of such claims, the fact is that he fired 10000 employees, from what used to be, from the outside, an engineering first company. And he sent hints to the market that more layoffs would come as agents become better.

  The first problem is: it looks we still need human beings, AI is great, but its not as awesome as we initially thought.

  The second problem is: all people who can leave are leaving, and those who can't are looking for a job. Humans, we need stability, a steady flow of income, and joy in what we do. By firing people and putting them in permanent observation, for an AI that will replace them, he is destroying any reason anybody would ever want to work for such a company.

  Mark would make a great Lumon CEO

  by seviu
• This comment reads so angry only because the OP doesn’t like what they read
  by felipellrocha
• He leads a Trillion dollar company that employs a lot of AI scientists and researchers.
  by throwawayffffas
• Even if zero net new insight, he has access to information on most things, not just AI, that the layperson might never have, even in the future. Not intended as praise at all (i'd say this is true for a lot of C-level in a lot of big companies).
  by 1minusp
• Yea he only runs one of the biggest technology companies in the world.
  by dbuser99
• I like that the most sober thing a CEO has said in a long time is getting the “who cares what CEOs think?” treatment.
  by ofjcihen
• 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.

  - He himself might even be a trend-follower in this case, and is presiding over an early dialing-back of AI-hype.

  by everdrive
• The last two years have been perfect for accumulating tech debt.

  2023 you would have probably implemented your Agents with LangChain and RAG

  2025 you'd use MCP and OpenAI/Anthropic Agent SDK.

  2027 you will use a workspace frameworks (Amazon, Microsoft) sensor libraries and world models.

  Agents are a fantastic generational technologies, but in mid-2026 the environment they are operating in is quickly changing.

  The only way forward is to stay agile, understand model and vendor risk.

  by jsemrau
• >2027 you will use a workspace frameworks (Amazon, Microsoft) sensor libraries and world models.

  The only people who'll be using Microsoft for anything AI are those whose employer forces them, like with Teams. All their AI offerings are overwhelmingly inferior for anything code related.

  by logicchains
• 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

  by mattas
• 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.

  by skybrian
• > it also demonstrates one of the most effective ways to increase productivity: simply reducing the workforce.

  You can cut costs and increase productivity by firing everyone else and taking no salary yourself. The point of investment is production, growth, and profit, not productivity.

  by mmooss
• The failure that is llama4 needs to be studied. Meta was kicking ass with llama3.x and then something happened, something really went wrong. what happened between that time and llama4? I think it happened after llama3.1, llama3.2 was nothing to write home about. We need the gossips, maybe a book
  by segmondy
• lecunn was at facebook after llmama3.1, says ai.
  by johnthescott
• PSC happened...
  by herval
• The head of AI at Meta at the time was famously anti-LLM (and still is), so it's not hard to see what happened.
  by paxys
• Llama 3 was truly something special.

  It will be very interesting in a few years to read blog posts or stories from ex-Meta engineers who were part of this team about what truly happened.

  by frays
• There was a rogue LLM project by the Meta Paris AI lab, there was a competing (and much worse performing one) coming out of the US that had official blessing.

  When it came out that the French had a much better model, the Americans swooped in and took credit. This is was the beginning of llama.

  The Frenchies were predictably pissed and left Meta over the next few years, as RSUs vested.

  by vrganj
• I would love to know that inside story. The whole saga is starting to look like one of the biggest own goals in history - Meta went from being widely respected and considered a peer with leading frontier labs to having no competitive technology. How a company seemingly willfully threw away a leading position in the most valuable tech race of all time should be a business case study, apart from a technology one.

  I do have a theory : Llama3.1 marks the point where Zuck got seriously interested and took over the reigns in driving the work. From the minute he started directing things instead of considering the AI work as a quirky side project, things went downhill. He tried to force a huge scale up in Llama4 which didn't work. Then as we know he disbanded the whole team and brought in a new crowd of mercenaries who may or may not have had the technical skills but they came into an organisation in disarray and still driven by Zuck himself who is continually forcing decisions that are not well founded in the science.

  All the above is an entirely evidence free fan fiction version of things, but I would be completely unsurprised if it is true.

  by zmmmmm
• I would absolutely buy that book. Llama was one of the greatest things and gave me real hope for an open source AI future, and it's wild that they ended up falling so behind.

  I've heard rumors that it had to do with talent loss, but just rumors.

  by freedomben
• 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.
  by _fat_santa
• I thought thats exactly what everyone anticipates? "Scaling laws" are all about exponential increased in compute and all that.
  by isityettime
• Did we? Many of us have been saying that the amount of compute going into the models is unsustainable and that the models aren’t improving enough to justify that for over a year. The emperor has no clothes is true yet again.
  by maccard