Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven’t progressed as quickly as he’d hoped

In Brief

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Replacing people with AI doesn’t seem to be that easy to do, if Meta can be seen as an example.

Reuters reports that at an internal town hall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected them to.

Earlier this year, Meta laid off some 8,000 employees — approximately 10% of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.

During this week’s meeting, Zuckerberg apparently commented on these job cuts — noting that they were not as “clean” as they should have been. The cuts were made because top officials at the company “were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough ‌to adapt” to the changing landscape of the tech industry, Zuckerberg reportedly added.

The corporate leader also apparently said that the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn’t “come to ​fruition yet,” although he said that he believed the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments during the next three to six months. Several other investigative reports have depicted Meta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag, according to some of the engineers assigned to it.

Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports.

TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.

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