Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven't progressed enough

The 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.

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, 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).

Maybe they'd make faster progress if they worked in the Metaverse.

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.

I 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.

How 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.

My 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.

AI agents are no good.

I wonder when he'll admit his hopes were baseless

why havent big tech employees formed a union?

"I was hoping AI had progressed enough so I could fire you. But you failed to make it so. Therefore, you're fired!"

Mark 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

I'm guessing this is specifically about Avocado which everyone at Meta would acknowledge is terrible.

i bet he wants some calculative shit

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