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

Internal Town Hall Reveals AI Development Challenges

At an internal town hall Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the pace of AI agent development had not "accelerated in the way" executives had previously expected them to, according to Reuters.

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.

Job Cuts and Restructuring

During this week's meeting, Zuckerberg 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 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.

Employee Sentiment and Investment

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.