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

Replacing humans with AI does not seem so easy to do, if Meta can be seen as an example.

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

Earlier this year, Meta approximately 8,000 employees laid off – about 10% of the company’s workforce – and has assigned another 7,000 people to various AI groups, including a group called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reports this.

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

The company executive also apparently said that the perceived benefits of the new AI-focused business structure had “not yet come to fruition,” although he said he believed the company would start to see improvements in its AI investments over the next three to six months. Several other research reports have depicted Meta’s months-old AI unit as a 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 this.

TechCrunch reached out to Meta for comment.