Meta CEO admits AI agents haven't progressed as fast as hoped

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff at an internal town hall on Thursday that the pace of AI agent development has not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected, according to Reuters. Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 8,000 employees — approximately 10 percent of its corporate workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, as reported by Bloomberg.

During the meeting, Zuckerberg commented on the 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 tech industry landscape, Zuckerberg reportedly added. He also said that the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn’t “come to fruition yet,” although he expressed belief that the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments over the next three to six months.

Several investigative reports have depicted Meta’s months-old AI unit as a “soul-crushing gulag,” according to some 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.