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

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff at an internal town hall that the pace of AI agent development has not "accelerated in the way" executives had previously expected. This admission comes after Meta laid off approximately 8,000 employees earlier this year and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation. During the meeting, Zuckerberg commented on the job cuts, noting they were not as "clean" as they should have been. He said the cuts were made because top officials were worried the company wasn't going to move fast enough to adapt to the changing tech landscape. Zuckerberg also said the perceived upside of the new AI-focused company structure hadn't "come to fruition yet," though he expressed belief that the company would begin to see improvements from its AI investments within 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. Despite the challenges, Meta has invested heavily in AI and is expected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, according to Reuters.