Comment by simonw

3 months ago

This is a thinner TechCrunch rewrite of this Reuters story: 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.

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simonw

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cyanydeez  3 months ago

the 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  3 months ago

    I 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.

    • cyanydeez  3 months ago

      and I'm saying all the harnesses in the world arn't going to solve the myopic ability.

      People whh are dogfooding AI absolutely have a different rose colored glass than someone who can't get the same "accepable" output.

      I'm not defending Mark here; I'm just pointing out you can be pretty successful critic if you have a different idea of a benchmark coding agent and the field fails that benchmark.

      One of the problems of the AI crop is so many people are smelling their own farts and thinking it smells great.

    • loeg  3 months ago

      Having used them all, the Meta model is weaker than flagship models (OpenAI/Anthropic).