[andreygrehov]

Who cares what Zuckerberg says about AI agents? He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook. He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher. What authority does he have to speak on the future of AI agents? Morale at his company is at an ATL, and that says more about his leadership skills he'd better off focusing on, otherwise the agents might replace him soon.

[everdrive]

I don't like Zuckerberg whatsoever, but there are plenty of reasons you could potentially care about his opinion:

- He could be well-placed to see whether AI agent development is successful since at a high level he oversees much of it, and will be getting detailed metrics and things.

- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies.

- He himself might even be a trend-follower in this case, and is presiding over an early dialing-back of AI-hype.

[cafebabbe]

Honest question, is there a single successful large investment made by Meta recently ? I just know about the abject failures :)

[throwaway27448]

llama has been generally useful.

[evilduck]

llama was unintentionally released and has been a flash in the pan for them since. They've failed to capitalize on it at all post-v2. v3 models were a launch mess and quickly surpassed. The only thing it has left in 2026 is name recognition. Honestly their non-LLM things are more important and relevant, like their SAM models. https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/ but none of these seem to be making them serious money or exist and standalone products.

[PaulHoule]

for "the rest of us" building certain kinds of systems on top of it.

as integrated into Meta's platforms it is clearly uncompetitive as a consumer chatbot with the likes of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini.

Like the other chatbots give me useful answers to questions even if they're wrong sometimes. Meta AI, on the other hand, cracks jokes about my foxwork. That's no so bad because sketch comedy is one of the foxwork skill areas (e.g. if I get you to laugh you are under my spell) but it's not useful and edifying the way competitors are.

[foobarbecue]

Ok, I'll bite. What's "foxwork"?

[PaulHoule]

I played enough video games to be thoroughly steeped in legends about fox spirits from the Sinosphere, almost three years ago I felt I received an invitation that I was a little afraid of. a year and a half ago I read

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0231133383

and found out that people really do it. It took me about 300 days to contract with a community of foxes and started "going out as a fox". At first I didn't want to explain it to people at all but when I botched my explanation and my wife gave me some tough love about "cultural appropriation" I realized I needed a cover story and it is "I go out as a character to do street photography and make people smile"

And it became real. My son didn't believe it until he saw me work: my son saw these two college girls walking down the street and thought "there is no way they would talk to me" and next thing he knows they flagged me down and are asking me questions and I took their picture. I went to fireworks in Groton, NY and the next day in Little York [1] I haven't even parked my car and people I saw the day before are excited to see me.

When I get approached every day it becomes effortless and automatic to make an approach and when I feel like I am getting a 50% take rate I think "I am doing something wrong and I need to regroup", my usual take rate is in the 80-90% range but it feels like 100%. I don't even talk with other street photographers about it on forums because I'm drawing from an entirely different probability distribution.

Thanks to this work, it looks like I will be teaching about magic soon [2] so I was working on a short monologue about blessings on the drive up to Little York which primed me to really respond when people I photographed said simple things like "Enjoy the Fourth of July" and eating soft serve ice cream from a vendor felt like the feast that Martin Prechtel says is the only ritual -- and I am still feeling high from it just like I felt high from going to Litha put on my my pagan friend.

See https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork

[1] one of the five Yorks of New York

[2] Magic is real, full stop. Science is real too, and there is nothing more scientific than the double-blind test that accounts for the placebo effect which is as I see it: "the patient experiences the treatment as receiving a blessing and feels better" and "the doctor experiences the treatment as giving a blessing and perceives the patient differently"

[swader999]

Maybe the glasses. After other companies have failed, they may have something here.

[thorncorona]

Meta retooled all their internal models to be LEM / LLM based recently.

[owebmaster]

Meta Glasses might be the next big thing.

[toasty228]

AR/VR is the next big thing since 2015, the cumulated revenues since then don't even match the yearly revenues they were predicting for 2020 alone. This is going to end up like 3d TVs

[ChrisGreenHeur]

Any day now.

[asdfsa32]

And it is even worst than Facebook and Social Media. We are doomed.

[dominotw]

glasses maybe but not meta glasses. Its not like meta has some patent on it.

[Der_Einzige]

Rayban glasses with the HUD in your eyeglass will go mainstream when they get a 10 hr battery instead of the 1.5 hr battery of today.

[doubleorseven]

- Whether or not his opinion is correct, tech CEOs are notorious trend-chasers, and his opinion could set the tone for other companies

exactly why I won't listen to someone who is falling behind.

[ezoe]

Being a CEO of a large corporation doesn't guarantee you the latest tech insight. You will be easily surrounded by yes men who speak what you wanted to hear.

[everdrive]

Agreed, all I'm saying is that his perception of the tech -- whether correct or incorrect could potentially either be trend-setting, or could be indicative of trends already in motion.

[wolttam]

Case in point: Metaverse.

[rh94]

My thoughts exactly. I think he is well positioned to see edge of ai tech as the money he spent (if allocated well) could give him bit more insights. Although questionoble how much he is still able with his background to understand, I don’t think he is as much engineer as he was used to be

[ofjcihen]

I like that the most sober thing a CEO has said in a long time is getting the “who cares what CEOs think?” treatment.

[Analemma_]

I'd say that about several other CEOs too if their fanboys wouldn't jump down my throat about it. Zuckerberg is just universally unpopular enough that you can get away with it

[throwaway27448]

What is a popular CEO? They're generally untrustworthy people.

[frenchtoast8]

Gabe Newell (president, not CEO) comes to mind

[alyandon]

I really worry about what happens to Valve as a company after he steps down.

[shimman]

Hopefully they'd stop introducing gambling to children.

[HWR_14]

Steve Jobs was. Elon Musk is.

Outside of tech Warren Buffett seems popular.

[jurip]

I don't know what the baseline is for CEO popularity (I guess most people don't know that many CEOs by name?) but I'd be hard-pressed to call a 37/50 favorable/unfavorable ratio popular: https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-polls-popularity-nate...

[HWR_14]

Maybe he's no longer popular, but he had a cameo in Iron Man 2 and hosted SNL. That speaks to popularity.

Also, is favorable/unfavorable a good measure of popularity?

[dbuser99]

Yea he only runs one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

[5701652400]

1 ex-PHP-dev CEO != 100,000+ SWEs who actually build technology of FB/Meta/IG/Whasapp

[bigbuppo]

You are correct. An individual developer's narrowly-scoped view of their work is not the same as an executive's view of the entire business.

[zyngaro]

A what ?

[5701652400]

what does "runs" actually mean? zoom calls from his private Hawai island to a bunch of buddies other C-level execs?

[lazide]

It means he has a controlling share over the money and all the power.

This thread is bizarre.

He can run the day to day string pulling however he wants, he is literally the one with all the power.

[GlacierFox]

Is it bizarre? Or is it you surrealist line of thinking here? What's your angle here? Man with power and money == A cornerstone knowledge base if you want know anything about AI? Wtf.

[lazide]

The question was, ‘who is in charge’, not ‘who I think should be, if it was my money’.

Y’all are delusional.

If you think they’re idiots, go start your own companies and eat their lunch. They got rich by eating someone else’s lunch, after all.

Right now, it is their game to lose.

[ToValueFunfetti]

Trump, Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, Biden, and Bankman-Fried all have or had a lot of power, and I would look to none of them if I wanted to get a better understanding of reality. If anything, I expect this kind of skin in the game to be strongly anticorrelated with providing useful takes; these are the people with the greatest incentives to mislead the public.

[1minusp]

Even if zero net new insight, he has access to information on most things, not just AI, that the layperson might never have, even in the future. Not intended as praise at all (i'd say this is true for a lot of C-level in a lot of big companies).

[throwawayffffas]

He leads a Trillion dollar company that employs a lot of AI scientists and researchers.

[throwaway27448]

I really wish people would stop using market cap as a standin for value. Investors are incredibly stupid. Meta has actual revenue to point at.

[throwawayffffas]

It's a concrete measure of available resources. More so than revenue.

[throwaway27448]

It is precisely the opposite of a concrete measure of anything but investor valuation. Investor valuation (or even just asset value, for that matter) doesn't have much weight when figuring out how seriously to take a CEO's words. Revenue at least has a modicum of signal of competency.

[throwawayffffas]

Investor valuation directly correlates to capital availability both in the sense of available capital to be raised in the market and as credit lines.

And this is Meta we are talking about not Tesla, it's P/E is like 20 something. The valuation is very reasonably correlated to the earnings.

[felipellrocha]

This comment reads so angry only because the OP doesn’t like what they read

[seviu]

All this is happening because many Silicon Valley CEOs are totally disconnected from humanity. I actually dont think Mark even sees his employees as human beings but rather as training data from a future where AI agents will just replace most of his workforce.

Regardless of wether this is right or wrong, and not even getting into the correctness of such claims, the fact is that he fired 10000 employees, from what used to be, from the outside, an engineering first company. And he sent hints to the market that more layoffs would come as agents become better.

The first problem is: it looks we still need human beings, AI is great, but its not as awesome as we initially thought.

The second problem is: all people who can leave are leaving, and those who can't are looking for a job. Humans, we need stability, a steady flow of income, and joy in what we do. By firing people and putting them in permanent observation, for an AI that will replace them, he is destroying any reason anybody would ever want to work for such a company.

Mark would make a great Lumon CEO

[cyphar]

Be honest, in the counterfactual where he had said that "AI" agents are the next industrial revolution and there is no future for human skills and so on -- would you have still valued his opinion as being effectively worthless?

[TimTheTinker]

> He is a PHP developer from the early '00s who got lucky with Facebook

Nice summary of a good hacker's viewpoint. All his money, power, and other non-technical signals don't really give him the technical authority to weigh on what really makes a technical difference.

That being said, depending on how good information-sharing is at the company, he might have a valuable perspective. But given that morale is low, it's doubtful that engineers feel free to tell the straight unvarnished truth without fear. And in typical large-company fashion, managers above them likely spin things positively as much as possible.

[khurs]

>Who cares

He spoke at an internal town hall for Meta. His employees care...

[throw-qqqqq]

> He's not an AI scientist or an AI researcher

Perhaps he employs some, you know, to inform him on the topic?

[tmule]

The same folks who informed him about how awesome Behemoth was?

[throw-qqqqq]

Snide remarks, both of you :)

My point was not that Meta has the best AI researchers/engineers.

My point was it should not matter if Zuck is a PHP developer or whatever, instead of an AI researcher, as he employs a lot of people with those exact skills.

I made no comment about how Meta is doing in the AI race, so it’s a bit besides the point IMO, but you did make me smile :)

[tmule]

I worked at Meta for roughly a decade, and have very little faith left in its leadership. I’m waiting for someone to play the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes and finally say the obvious out loud … to Emperor Zuck himself.

[KellyCriterion]

...and the same people who informed him about this Metaverse-Trend-thingy :-D

[pjmlp]

Unfortunately all that money also made React and Next.js a reality.

[1970-01-01]

He didn't "get lucky" with Facebook. He put in the time and effort to build, dropping out of Harvard, etc. It's all very well documented.

[geriatricguy]

The cold hard reality is that, despite the attempt at creating a cult of personality around the man, he's far further along his journey of computer science than being a php dev from 2 decades ago. Boiling down his credentials to being simply a dev from a bygone era is hilarious

On that note, does anyone have the authority to speak about AI agents that would satisfy your requirements? It's not exactly quantum chromodynamics, it's glorified automation that costs a lot more and does it poorly.

[mondainx]

Nice take, but aside from all this, I think he could whoop Elon's butt in a fight.. lol

[dominotw]

unlike sam altman who basically invented the transfomer

[scrollop]

I thought that he invented the computer chip?

[ActionHank]

Those who've made AI their entire personality really do seem to lack the emotional fortitude to deal with someone else having an opinion.

I'm anti Zuck, but it's mostly because he's a lizard man with no morals. You are anti Zuck because he's mentioned that the promise of AI isn't going to the moon as promised. We are not the same.

[happyPersonR]

The most correct opinion

No disrespect to anyone that worked or works at meta:

We can build a better version of his whole platform in 30 mins.

[Quarrelsome]

at that scale? They serve an awful lot of requests, so I don't think 30m will cover it.

[ahartmetz]

He's incredibly rich. Americans greatly respect rich people, the richer the more respect. It's apparently a bizarre reinterpretation/misunderstanding of Calvinism.

[sesteel]

The respect only goes as far as to listen to what they have to say. We navigate our experience based on the whims of the rich so it helps to know what they are thinking, but it certainly doesn't confer much respect. Most are completely out of touch.

[ahartmetz]

I trolled there, with a kernel of truth. The neutral version is that wealth is a contributor to respect that's unusually strong in the US and I do think that it goes back to Calvinism.