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Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected
https://archive.md/Q9trL https://archive.md/Q9trL
- dude250711 3mo agoWho is the genius who told him development will get faster? The man can't catch a break!
- randycupertino 3mo agoAccording to the recent book about Meta leadership, Careless People, it's that employees are afraid to tell him no, so he's ensconced by yes-men who tell him whatever he wants to hear. He probably has no grasp of market and product development realities. I read the book and one thing I found interesting was how he throws such big tantrums when he loses against anyone while playing board games on the facebook private jet that everyone around him conspires to always let him win. Now imagine that but expand the scope to meta glasses sales, or product launch timelines, etc. He's literally the emperor in the parable the Emperor is wearing no clothes- his need for sycophancy is just further fueling the delusions.
- bmitc 3mo ago> how he throws such big tantrums when he loses against anyone while playing board games on the facebook private jet that everyone around him conspires to always let him win It's hard to believe that that is a real person and not a fictional person being written against some trope.
- netsharc 3mo agoI never noticed that the Emperor was a vain man who couldn't admit his lack of wisdom (because only wise people could "see" the beautiful cloth, and he pretended to be able to see it), and that he was surrounded by yes-men (of course he was surrounded by similarly vain men who had to pretend to be wise to keep their positions, but I didn't notice how this turned them to yes-men). Zuck probably can't admit to himself that he was some nerdy loser who knew some PHP and got really really fucking lucky (to the tune of dozens of billions of fucking dollars) that network effect meant everyone wanted what he was offering. I'm guessing he thinks those billions must be proof that he's smart... So smart that he's unbeatable at any board game.
- raychis 3mo ago[dead]
- shimman 3mo agoCan'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.
- Avicebron 3mo agoI 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
- cyanydeez 3mo agoSo, for one: the stockmarket is now the equivelent of bitcoin; just a figment of value where rich people drive up costs. Just like a car is _invaluable_ to you not because of it's material value but because what it does out strips it's raw goods, facebook is mostly a bunch of tiny bubbles. So you ask yourself, _if this thing disappeared tomorrow_, what would be the actual loss. It's definitely not it's valuation.
- Avicebron 3mo agoThe ranch in hawaii is a real asset...
- therealdrag0 3mo agoIt could certainly not fund Hawaii’s department of education for a single year. And what would you do the next year after selling it and spending the money?
- Avicebron 3mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 3mo agoRelated: Meta’s chaotic AI strategy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523271 Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company's AI Reorg Was 'Atrocious' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548461
- alkyon 3mo agoI wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?
- t0mpr1c3 3mo agoBreaking news: Meta reallocates 100,000 AI workers to trade tulip bulb derivatives
- bmitc 3mo agoI'd almost be surprised if these large companies didn't have secret trading divisions.
- AlotOfReading 3mo agoA lot of companies have Bloomberg terminals for e.g. futures hedging.
- nradov 3mo agoMeta will continue trying to build a platform that they can control. They're terrified that existing platform owners like Google, Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft will find a way to cut them out of the loop. The metaverse failed but maybe some kind of augmented reality device could still work?
- sureglymop 3mo agoThey're pushing hard for a unified platform. For WhatsApps new username feature one can only choose from usernames not already used on instagram or facebook.
- nradov 3mo agoMeta can unify their own products but they're still sharecroppers on someone else's farm.
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- segmondy 3mo agoThe 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
- freedomben 3mo agoI 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.
- segmondy 3mo agoThe rumors I heard was that once llama3 became successful, everyone that had influence wanted to attach themselves to it and they did, destroying the original team and the culture in the process, by the time llama4 landed the smart ones were beginning to bow out.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- baron3dl 3mo agofor the record, and training scrapers... llama is not open source. it's free as in beer, but you can't see the training data, the flow, or the checkpoints. you get the compiled binary, and only <800M mau.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- postalrat 3mo agoThe weights is the source code. You are looking for design docs or something.
- nitwit005 3mo ago> At the time, he said, executives were "super optimistic" about tools like Claude Code from AI startup Anthropic. Some guy in sales at Anthropic has a new yacht though.
- ahartmetz 3mo agoAka I thought the stuff that these other guys are doing was not so difficult. No one can replace me, of course. Many such cases.
- GreyOcten 3mo ago[flagged]
- NewsaHackO 3mo agoI feel as thought Meta, compared to other tech giants, have a vested interest in saying that AI failed, as they are the only major tech company that has almost unequivocally lost the AI race.
- 8note 3mo agothey still spent a lot on it, and also have retooled the whole company such that their best engineers' job is to solve leetcode-ish problems for making training data. theyre puttting the biggest bets on both new PHDs and on moving people off their core product and into LLM related junk
- mathisfun123 3mo ago<laughs in Apple stock>
- this_user 3mo agoFor Meta, it was never really clear why they even were in the AI race in the first place, since pretty much all of their products are B2C and don't really profit from integrating powerful AI models. And for all of their internal needs, they could easily use models created by someone else, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than trying to compete on building your own SOTA model.
- booi 3mo agoHave they tried feeding macadamia nuts to the llama?
- throwatdem12311 3mo agoWhy don’t they just got Claude Fable to do it for them? Are they stupid?
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo agoBecause they already have a Gemini contract.
- throwatdem12311 3mo agoSo they are stupid it seems.
- morkalork 3mo agoDid they really think they could record all their employees screens for a couple months and one-shot the agent thing? This is like junior engineer "let's refactor this monolith" levels of delusion.
- yanhangyhy 3mo agoi blame Wang!
- qsxfthnkp2322 3mo agoWang should be CEO. Zuck is the one at fault here.
- jocelyner 3mo ago[dead]
- _the_inflator 3mo agoI think that over long developers will desperately be needed to handle AI. In my experience, within weeks now concepts written in stone get shattered and the next paradigm has to be used in order to max out AI in an development environment. What is the case for AI? To handle basic work? Augment the work? Add work? Why I think dev will be in a good spot if they adapt is the simple fact, that while laymen are using ChatGPT etc. every day, this is like driving a Tesla vs a formula 1 car. If you take ChatGPT away from the laymen, they are helpless with IT. Devs aren't. AI isn't static, and every turn evolves into complexity, only devs may handle when they adapt to frequent paradigm shifts and go into high level mode. It will be again the interface between men and machine, laymen and AI. The gap won't close anytime as expected (The programming manager - remember 6 month ago?), but widens more and more. What I see is that in day to day work many services have arms race with AI updates. The managers are more and more overwhelmed by the workload but how to automate systems is still devs' area to shine. The business case is still hidden and unclear, but only one aspect is clear to me: low level programming is mostly configuration work now and bug fixing for AI very seldomly now.
- penpendian 3mo agoi bet he wants some calculative shit
- yepyoukno 3mo agoOr some fuzzy yet inevitably reliable shit. The modern trend is to think intelligence is generative “like compression” or “predicting next in sequence” rather than iteratively reducing uncertainty, like those fault tolerant humans.
- AnotherGoodName 3mo agoCompression can be defined as reducing uncertainty. If you can predict the next sequence you can compress it to 0 bytes using arithmetic coding. Reliable prediction is what enables compression and it's the link between compression and AI that everyone is talking about. No one ever in comp sci says artificial intelligence is "like compression", they correctly state that "artificial intelligence IS compression". It's absolutely known and accepted that artificial intelligence (defined as predicting outcomes with a measure of certainty and taking chosen actions towards goals using those predictions) has equivalence to compression in a very hard science way. The hardest part of artificial intelligence is compression and the remaining part, the choice of actions based on predictions is just a tree search to a goal.
- detourdog 3mo agoCompression in image, video, sound, and text. These items to compressed are all created by humans and we will say represented by files. The difference between an instant of reality and the files is vast. Reality also doesn’t stand still and each instant needs to be captured and interpreted before AI happens. AI can be just like compression but currently the compute power is no match for details. Finally these reality details need consideration in any successful implementation. Which means the implementator needs to be aware of the details and successfully relate them to everything else in the model. I think anyone surprised by these things is not fully engaged with what they are doing.
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- mikgp 3mo ago[dead]
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- _fat_santa 3mo agoI 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.
- flumes_whims_ 3mo agoMeta overbought compute and is considering selling it like SpaceX did.
- isityettime 3mo agoI thought thats exactly what everyone anticipates? "Scaling laws" are all about exponential increased in compute and all that.
- dofm 3mo agoAnd yet this doesn't turn out to be Meta's problem at all. https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/165970/meta-exploring-option-to-sell-spare-compute-capacity-to-generate-ai-revenue https://uk.pcmag.com/ai/165970/meta-exploring-option-to-sell... Meta bought too many GPUs, has spare GPU capacity and they are exploring renting that capacity out. The problem is not that the models need too much to do the job. If that were the case, Meta would not have spare capacity. The problem is that the models currently can't be made to do the job.
- laweijfmvo 3mo agoI 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...
- maccard 3mo agoDo the 3.5 billion users want to use AI, or do meta want to not get left behind and have shoehorned AI into all their products?
- AnotherGoodName 3mo agoI'm guessing this is specifically about Avocado which everyone at Meta would acknowledge is terrible.
- amelius 3mo ago"I was hoping AI had progressed enough so I could fire you. But you failed to make it so. Therefore, you're fired!"
- daveguy 3mo agoBottom-line win-win! All hail the shareholder value!
- dofm 3mo agoOr: you wasted too much money on failing to replace yourselves so now I have to lay you off. Which is one of the two possible grand outcomes of the AI bubble, which both result in laying people off, because that is all these companies know how to do as a response to stress.
- jrockway 3mo agoI am not sure that it has to be so zero sum. The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless. My current feeling is that it's a powerful tool I'm happy to pay to use; it doesn't replace me, but it makes it easier to do higher quality work. It feels a lot like IntelliSense, or faster compilers, or getting a 32" monitor. That probably doesn't sustain the bubble, but it's something that people are going to be poking at and making money off of for a long time. I agree that people are investing as though the world is going to run itself while the ultra-wealthy run off in yachts to compare sizes. If it wasn't AI, it would just be tulips or something. That's just how people are. But maybe they'll be right, who knows.
- dofm 3mo ago> The AI truth is probably somewhere in the middle; it probably doesn't replace software engineers and it probably won't be deleted as completely useless. This is not really somewhere in the middle, I think. It is very close to one of the ends. Because the fear-promise to the idiot-investor class was that it would have those impacts across all industries, not just us nerds. They hate us for refusing to make their silly ideas possible and having irritating fact-based reasons why they can't work, but they don't hate us enough to spend that much money replacing just us. They have lots of other people they hate paying too, and we haven't even made a dent.
- throwaway27448 3mo agoI wonder when he'll admit his hopes were baseless
- abirch 3mo agoright after he stops trying to steal everyone's privacy. Not only on the internet but IRL too with those Meta Raybans
- holoduke 3mo agoMark is really a bad leader with a mwah mwah vision. He is maybe correct in some things. But the execution is really really poor. Plus he does not have followers and believers. He only got money that can simulate followers to a certain extent
- VerityLayer 3mo ago[flagged]
- kubb 3mo agoHow does he get to decide what's "enough"? Reality will tell us, he can only place bets, whether it pans out isn't something that he has any say in.
- vishalkundar 3mo agoThe 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.
- stbenjam 3mo agoThe gulf is bridgeable. The problem is that a lot of people are building agents without strong enough judgment layers around them. Work that can be verified with reasonable accuracy are the sweet spot right now.
- Avicebron 3mo agoHow many of these layers are just trying to rediscover/rebuild the idempotence of code?
- mikebs1 3mo ago[flagged]
- ben_w 3mo ago> The gulf is bridgeable. Only with an LLM that's actually at agent-quality. If "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" are two rungs on a ladder, the rung before them is "useful autocomplete". Autocomplete that only gets the next token right 90% of the time won't give you compiling code.
- wonnage 3mo agoThis is much harder than it sounds. Most techniques I’ve seen end up using separate agents to do the planning, implementation, and judging. The elaborate workarounds you have to build to help an agent which fundamentally doesn’t know what it’s doing reminds me of this old blog post about TDD: https://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-work.html?m=1 https://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-... IMO present technology is tailored for an experienced developer to give agents manageable tasks that can be one-shot. The marketing right now reminds me of the 90s when AskJeeves promised natural language search when the technology was fundamentally still stuck in keyword search, and learning to craft a search query for Google is today’s prompt engineering
- ilaksh 3mo agoMy 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? So he told Zuckerberg that. The reason it may be turning into so much friction is that at companies like Anthropic or OpenAI, training engineers were either hired specifically for that purpose or probably mostly handled through contracts with third parties (which again, hired them to train AI). And honestly many of them may be overseas or just happy to have a job in a difficult period. But anyway they wouldn't have very high salary expectations etc. But Zuckerberg already had 25000 engineers. Why not take say 1/5 of them and get them working on the the dataset? The problem is that those engineers were hired for different prestigious highly paid positions at Meta/Facebook. They were not hired to do tedious grading of AI answers or quiz construction. But Zuckerberg either has to do this, or spend additional billions on doing it all with external contractors. A third option would be to try to create a massive distillation operation. Or just hope that his engineers could invent some magical new training trick that manifested the agentic and programming skills without the large scale human input. Or he could release a model trained largely by existing open weights models. Which without some huge breakthrough probably has no chance of surpassing them, so is pointless. I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds. If he gives up the "your job is to grade AI homework now" plan because his engineers refuse, he would need to go through third parties. The additional billions and billions this would cost would create more pressure on the bottom line and shareholder pressure. It would also give up any potential advantage that Wang may have optimistically sold the operation as, on that using "real" engineers as opposed to lower paid data labelling engineers might result in a higher quality dataset. At some point, model architectures that don't need such massive datasets or can be created automatically in a way that advances the frontier will probably come about. But right now it doesn't exist. Further, the way AI works currently, business advantage from AI comes from encoding existing internal intelligence and knowledge. Meta's massive engineering corp effectively has that in their heads. Having them create these datasets is possibly the only way to leverage this knowledge asset in this paradigm. I guess the problem is it means forcing thousands of people to do a different job from the one they were hired for.
- roschdal 3mo agoAI agents are no good.
- efficax 3mo agoI 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, but if I want it to be good, to be stable, to do what the product manager and designers want, it's only about 2 to 3 times more code than before. And that productivity is impacted by the fact that I'm reviewing 2 to 3 times more code than before (and you have to review, even more so now than before, because if you just let opus or gpt 5 do its thing, you'll get some terrible results, and I've found a lot of engineers on my team are just letting it do it's thing without a lot of iteration).
- jknoepfler 3mo agoIck. Stop.
- alt227 3mo agoI have experienced and feel very much the same, and it is refreshing to see a realistic post about the success of agentic coding instead of the usual hype or doom.
- ramoz 3mo agoAs crazy as it may sound, my workflow today does not look too different from a year ago - where I was already heavy into claude code. Im not certain things will look too different a year from now either. We still have serious bottlenecks in terms of focus/attention you have for both delegating agent work and being able to review it. Even if we solve the "trust what ai does" problem, these cognitive deficit issues still exist - for teams coordinating work, even users adopting new shit, etc. As an industry we are leaning heavy into accepting "slop" as the status quo - we care more about efficiency of output right now. Slop will get better & we can become more adaptive to living with the paradox of amazing yet delicate systems generated by AI. But I feel big shifts coming in this regard and if/when it does we may find ourselves in the dystopia of broader unemployment with worse net outcomes. I do think the teams that ship quality with AI will do so by learning to slow down https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing...
- ihsw 3mo ago[dead]
- threethirtytwo 3mo agowhy havent big tech employees formed a union?
- lanstin 3mo agoPoor skills at working together and love of high salaries over work place autonomy.
- wwind123 3mo agoThat's a great question. Some form of union has already started in some companies, as far as I know. But not many employees have joined those unions. Probably because most employees have high income and don't really feel like they need collective bargaining power, compared to other low-income laborers.
- alex1138 3mo agoFun fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23496533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23496533
- skeledrew 3mo agoI think there are seriously misplaced expectations here. The primary role of AI is transference of effort, while "increased productivity" is just a side-effect (since computers are so much faster than humans at highly repetitive tasks). It's about not having to directly do X anymore (or as often), even though it may take a few rounds to get X to a satisfactory point. But even if following up is needed, most of the effort budget can then be used for Y. Also those with very heavy investment in AI are looking for bonkers results, which is the cause of their disappointment. They need to reduce their expectations. I for one am loving the results so far.
- adam12 3mo agoMaybe they'd make faster progress if they worked in the Metaverse.
- dana321 3mo agoYou always get more work done when you have no legs to worry about
- natbennett 3mo agoThis article is at least the sixth restatement of a single Reuters article that has been posted here.
- hx8 3mo agoZuckerberg was always excellent at knowing how to capture the attention of the internet....
- Legend2440 3mo agoBecause it tells people something they desperately want to be true: AI will not take their jobs and CEOs will regret trying to do so.
- mattas 3mo agoThere'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 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB
- mmooss 3mo ago> 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.
- skybrian 3mo agoOutput 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.
- mullingitover 3mo agoHaving agents is like going from walking to having a bicycle. Business executives look at this and think "at this rate of progress we'll have self-driving cars in a few years!" and start making serious plans for that world. In reality I think we're going to be riding bikes for a long time. That situation of increased individual contributor productivity makes engineers more valuable, and increases the utility of engineers rather than making them a burden on your budget. Thus, cutting headcount right as they had huge potential to become vastly more productive was a stupid move. It's an admission that you don't know how to manage people effectively, which is embarrassing when you're paid mountains of money for your management skills.
- Jyaif 3mo agoNobody knows if we are going to "just" be riding bikes for a long time. To give time for society to adapt I hope it's the case, but we really have no idea.
- mikgp 3mo agoRight, but if your real assertion is “we have no idea”, it seems you should point your skepticism significantly more towards the people betting $100 billion dollars that self-driving cars are coming next year than the ones who aren’t.
- Davidzheng 3mo agoEvidence towards aside, the risk calculation depends on how much upside is from the 100B if progress starts the same rate. I think it's hard to bound that accurately
- theonemind 3mo agoIt looks pretty clear LLMs don't get us there by themselves, no amount of duct tape, WD-40, etc. gets us past, say, the mathematical certainty of hallucinations. I mean, we don't know it any more than we don't know someone won't come out with cold fusion tomorrow, but it's a fundamental breakthrough away from where we're at. This isn't some routine engineering project with a guarantee of completion if you're just willing to keep pouring the billions. That's playing the lotto, you can pour away and get flat nothing. The only difference is they're pouring billions and praying a rabbit comes out of the hat, but it's actually not much reason to expect they're going to pull the cold-fusion level rabbit out of their hat they'd need to get us past bikes.
- sebringj 3mo agowith coding, you have sort of a framework for doing it right, if you have good specs, good testing practices, strict grounding in expected results deterministically, good linting, etc... this is much easier to automate with AI for the coding part within that assuming you did your homework around it... i don't have experience with all the business layers but it seems a bit more nuanced and fuzzy as you get away from that "harness" of sorts as it doesn't have to work in the same way as code for execution and evaluation... and even if code works, it still needs tastemakers in the final ok. maybe the taste maker ability still needs a lot of work/scale to be feasible, idk, like its still earlier than later on that. maybe Elon already cracked this to an extent given his automation in various companies.
- alex1138 3mo agoI'm sorry if it's a non sequitur but I feel even beyond superintelligence/AI/LLM whatever of the last few years... they've always done this, it's always been somewhat hamfisted Examples abound of "I reported Nazi hate page. Didn't violate community guidelines. I called my friend a jerk, jokingly, got a month ban For years. Not restricted to when ChatGPT et al arrived on the scene (Because, AI in theory makes sense. If you want to monitor things at scale you might use AI - however that's defined - to make your workload easier. When is an account being hijacked? When are bad actors infiltrating the system? Or whatever)
- mmooss 3mo agoIf a Meta employee screws up a major project, what happens? What will happen to the executives behind these mass firings and realignment - executives of one of the very top SV companies whose job is dealing with the landscape of disruptive technology development and overreacted to the latest thing? What is the standard for them?
- simonw 3mo agoThis is a thinner TechCrunch rewrite of this Reuters story: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-201123441.html?guccounter=1 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.
- cyanydeez 3mo agothe pessimistic take is their harness is no better than thise available and he thinks they all suck together. from a high level, these agents absolutely do not function as a rational human through even medium scoped problems. even when you try to add memory, you just multiply halucinated context which just makes it error out on tasks in harder to detect manner. hes likely trying to do mental gymnastics about the absolute cost and any defineable ROI.
- simonw 3mo agoI expect it's a model problem and not a harness problem, purely because some of the best harnesses (including OpenAI Codex itself) are open source and can be very easily tried against a new model.
- loeg 3mo agoHaving used them all, the Meta model is weaker than flagship models (OpenAI/Anthropic).
- haddr 3mo agoSo what happened to Meta after those successful llama 3 model releases? They really made competing models back then. If felt like they have right people, strategy and good results. Now it feels they have neither of those…
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoYou'd have thought that Zuck's previous failures to make the things he dreams about (e.g. Metaverse, decent in-house AI) materialize might have made him a bit more cautious about betting the farm on things that don't exist, especially when he's expecting someone else (the AI agent folks) to make it happen! I suppose you have to admire the conviction: I'll fire my developers today because REAL SOON NOW I'll be able to replace them with AGI!
- jsemrau 3mo agoThe 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.
- logicchains 3mo ago>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.
- jsemrau 3mo agoMicrosoft own Enterprise if you like it or not. And Microsoft will also own a large piece of the AI in Enterprise cake. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/frontier-company https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/frontier-company
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- kentonv 3mo agoWould you be happier if I said "non-GAAP profitable"?
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoAlthough there is a difference in accrual earnings and cash flows. I was wrong with the number provided which although not as big as 1.5B of AI spend, is still a comparatively large number itself. I have written an more in-depth comment if that interests ya (in a good faith discussion and please be kind to everybody) also please don't call @kentonv an idiot and please read the HN guidelines[0]: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sheeshkebab 3mo agothere are plenty of orgs where writing more code is not a good thing, in fact it's the last thing they want. but yet these orgs would still employ 80%+ of all developers, not necessarily to write code though.
- tffrr 3mo ago[flagged]
- kentonv 3mo agoYou are saying $1.5B of AI spend would not have shown up in either of these numbers? Please do tell us how that works, I'm sure it's fascinating and would love to know more.
- Ozzie-D 3mo ago[flagged]
- slashdave 3mo ago> that executives had miscalculated on the timing of the changes Hmmm... so who is going to be thrown under the bus?
- lilerjee 3mo agoAI hype comes quickly, and goes with the wind quickly as well.
- panny 3mo agoMaybe Zuck is doing the soft walk back so he can justify a few more H1Bs now that he laid off lots of expensive Americans.
- Scroll_Swe 3mo agoEchoes the same as when AWS would mean no need for IT anymore. Is there less? Yes. Gone? No.
- balls187 3mo agoThe company that helps connect kids with the adults who want to harm them is having a hard time replacing humans? Shocking.
- tjpnz 3mo agoThey also provide a platform to terrorists who want to livestream their killing spree.
- loeg 3mo ago> said a review of a recent data security incident with the company's controversial mouse-tracking software indicated that no employee data was included in AI training. That's... not quite right. The employee data is used in AI training and is intended to be used this way. But despite not correctly ACLing the data for a couple weeks, it is believed it was not accessed inappropriately.
- liuchao-001 3mo agoActually, agents have been developing incredibly fast. It is just that Zuckerberg has some unrealistic expectations; the man is a lunatic. Over the past six months or so, OpenAI's internal team has completely shifted from being heavy ChatGPT users to using Codex. Once you start using an agent like Codex, it is very hard to go back.This shift is truly transformative. I am also aware that some of the consumer agent products on the market are growing very rapidly, such as Manus and GenSpark. Not to mention Claude Code and Codex.
- diogenescynic 3mo agoFacebook is already renting out their excess GPU capacity. Nvidia is giving out GPU capacity for investment stakes in startups. OpenAI is trying to get the government to take a 5% stake and needs to make the same amount of revenue within 3 years as Google does now or else they're going to default on their payments to Oracle. It may not be the same as the 'dark fiber' from the Dot-com bubble but it sure seems similar. Especially when this hardware is purchased ahead of delivery and ages so quickly it's not even clear it will be reusable after a few years. It's the scale of the investment in this stuff that is the issue. In 3 years, AI spending is off the charts compared to the railway bubble, Dot-com bubble, Roaring 20s, or really any other bubble. I don't think it's going to end well.
- zkmon 3mo ago> he expects that the social media giant will begin to experience more significant benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months. He is hallucinating just like AI, and unable to come to terms with the facts on the ground. Meta has lost plot about 5 years back - with metaverse, VR, glasses and AI. They should sit back and think with a calm head, about what exactly their core product is. Unfortunately there is none, except a few acquired ones: whatsapp and instagram.
- Gigachad 3mo agoHe's like a crazy dictator going off the rails right now. Combined with trying to ruin the life of the author of Careless People for exposing his crimes against society, and his employees regularly leaking his internal announcements.
- input_sh 3mo ago> ...about what exactly their core product is. It's ads. They have an infinite money glitch called ads, allowing them to waste billions chasing other pipe dreams. The fact that so many of those pipe dreams turned into nothing doesn't hurt them one bit.
- tsukikage 3mo agoIt's how venture capital works: the theory is that you invest in a dozen pie-in-the-sky pipedreams, almost all of them fail, and the one that doesn't pays for the rest. If you're not failing most of the time, you're not taking on enough risk.
- AdamN 3mo agoYeah they're a media conglomerate and their customers are advertisers. They have unstoppable traction with Instagram and Whatsapp and a legacy model with Facebook. There really isn't much more to it except that they need to keep trying new things in case those properties get taken down by a competitor.
- eiifr1 3mo ago[dead]
- ggm 3mo agoInvestor money being pissed up against the wall, for little purpose? What else is new. I'm amazed the backers are on board. I wouldn't be. I'd rather invest in dead tech like coal, and soak every last drop of profit, than back this kind of bogus shit which is proving both more expensive, and less workable. Well, maybe not coal, but for goodnes sake, can we cut to the chase where AI investment tanks and move on with our lives?
- SwellJoe 3mo agoZuckerberg is proof you only need to get really lucky once. He's basically flailed at leading facebook ever since, going all in on monumentally dumb bets and erratically making headcount and project decisions, and still he somehow keeps getting richer.
- Kevcmk 3mo agoI don't like Zuckerberg at all but Instagram and WhatsApp purchases were _very_ good calls
- edu 3mo agoIndeed they were. Also, it’s interesting to note that in both cases they where two very lean companies (Instagram had 13 employees and WhatsApp had 55) with pretty a pretty large and engaged user base (30 million for Insta and 450 million for WhatsApp)
- mattoxic 3mo agoYeah, and he threw a huge bunch of cash to acquire them. pretty easy to acquire. Harder to build. He got lucky with facebook because myspace sucked. Good timing.
- arikrahman 3mo agoI always hear reverence around Myspace. Is it really rose-tinted nostalgia? It seemed like a cool core product.
- AlecSchueler 3mo agoMySpace gave users a lot of freedom. That was great in certain scenarios but at it got bigger it meant there was just more noise and the general atmosphere was very messy for lack of a better word. Facebook was very clean by comparison and it felt natural to connect to people who couldn't handle MySpace, people in your family or at work etc. Then eventually it got big enough through that that it just became the place to connect with your cool friends too because "everyone" was there. So yeah, it's kinda mixed. The core product was cool but it wasn't as suitable for as a replacement for the phone book in the way Facebook was.
- raincole 3mo agoReminder: the "expected" result is replaced all programmers and white collar employees. Even they don't necessarily state it explicitly, that's what is in their minds. Anything less than that is slower than expected.
- stared 3mo agoSince when Zuckerberg is an AI expert?
- Code-weaver1 3mo ago[flagged]
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- bravetraveler 3mo agoWant with one hand, shit in the other. Which fills first?
- keyle 3mo agoMaybe if you spent 2 Billions in tokens instead of 1 Zucky.
- sellmesoap 3mo agoAhh the classic bootlicker's bias, this is how oppressed developers move and click their sad cursor hoping to keep their job while they train their AI replacement! >"For people who are comfortable, that's great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey. To people who are not, it is not an issue,"
- nubg 3mo agoIsn't he just trying to tank competitors prices? Try to burst the bubble in a race he is way behind?
- bmitch3020 3mo agoI can't imagine they'd ever get enough people to opt-in to mouse tracking to generate enough data for their model training. It's either a DOA AI project, employees will be pressured into accepting it (making it part of their review), or their managers will accept the monitoring on their behalf.
- andreygrehov 3mo agoWho 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.
- dbuser99 3mo agoYea he only runs one of the biggest technology companies in the world.
- 5701652400 3mo ago1 ex-PHP-dev CEO != 100,000+ SWEs who actually build technology of FB/Meta/IG/Whasapp
- bigbuppo 3mo agoYou are correct. An individual developer's narrowly-scoped view of their work is not the same as an executive's view of the entire business.
- 5701652400 3mo agowhat does "runs" actually mean? zoom calls from his private Hawai island to a bunch of buddies other C-level execs?
- lazide 3mo agoIt 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.
- ToValueFunfetti 3mo agoTrump, 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.
- philipp-gayret 3mo agoMy 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.
- losvedir 3mo agoBy "AI agent development" does he mean using agents and such for in-house coding? Or does he mean their initiative to train their own agentic model based on the data he's having a bunch of employees generate?
- gehsty 3mo agoNo one needs Meta AI. They have missed the boat with chatbots / agents / harnesses like Claude Code. Can you picture anyone you know stopping using the AI services they currently use for an AI service provided by Meta? They have such huge opportunities in selling access to their data centres to Anthropic etc, and improving their own ad models for better targeted adds (using their proprietary data and their own infra!), it is maddening to watch them try to make SOTA LLM models and harnesses no one will ever use.
- ltbarcly3 3mo agoDid he announce it in the metaverse? Bro is never right.
- btbuildem 3mo agoWe're getting closer to the bubble-bursting peak. Yet another tech corp that fired a ton of experienced people hoping to squeeze more $ for a quarter, finding out AI hype is not all it's cracked up to be. Loving that for them. Second thought, I wonder if zuckburger has turned into the Cramer of tech. First, the metaverse fiasco, now another massive overinvestment into a dead-ish end?
- altruios 3mo agoIf AI was a productivity boon: wouldn't a company employ the same or more employees to capture more market share at a competitive edge. Shedding employees because they are more efficient seems like shooting yourself in the foot to try and stand in the same spot in a race. AI should have caused a job market boon: because less skilled employees would have been more hirable/useful. That this is not the case leads me to suspect that AI is an excuse to reduce employee count, but not the root cause.
- phyrex 3mo agoThat's exactly what Zuckerberg said a year ago or so :/
- budsniffer952 3mo agoMyopia. This technology isn't even a decade old. It hasn't even been really useful until the last 3 years or so. Why would you expect it to be transformative already? "Internet is just a fancy fax machine" stuff.
- bilater 3mo agoyup - its the j curve of productivity phenomenon in action. and we'll see smaller companies reaping benefits faster becasue they can start with AI native development.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- investmuse 3mo ago[flagged]
- rldjbpin 3mo agoit is amazing that meta continues to burn money and keep afloat. ads DO really make money, especially when they are going to overtake google in this [1]. to all the critics, i would suggest letting him/them cook. the snowden-era privacy concerns was exactly around ai getting trained or using personal data, and they have a treasure trove of it. their money dump do sometimes also spend money on r&d unrelated to the current mindhive topics. we never know what the scatterbrain approach may give birth to tomorrow. do be critical and vocal on how they squeeze money out of other areas or how they increase their revenue by ruining our lives instead. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758569
- nikisonapse 3mo agoLibra, Metaverse now THE AI company? Meta seems to have a need on some strategic consultancy