Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to keep his AI team together.
As morale is hitting rock-bottom, his company is heavily relying on its competitors’ AI models to build out its own in-house tools. And despite the many billions of dollars the company has spent in its flailing efforts to keep up in the AI race, even Zuckerberg himself is now acknowledging that progress is nowhere near where he wanted it to be.
As Reuters reports, Zuckerberg admitted during a town hall last week that AI agents in particular aren’t progressing as fast as he anticipated, a devastating revelation following enormous layoffs that wiped out thousands of roles at the company.
The “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” he said according to a recording obtained by Reuters.
The reorganization effort’s timing was miscalculated and the job cuts were not “clean,” Zuckerberg said, while arguing that the plan had yet to “come to fruition.”
It’s only the latest indication of major chaos behind the scenes as the tech giant struggles to remain relevant in an AI race being fought out by its competitors. That’s despite Meta committing to spending a stunning $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, a record sum that could’ve paid for an untold number of salaries.
It also highlights a growing trend of tech companies realizing that replacing human workers with AI is vastly more difficult than anticipated, with some going as far as to rehire those who were let go.
Beyond Meta’s frantic AI efforts, company leaders also had to address yet another major sore point during last week’s town hall. Last month, Meta was forced to pause its controversial employee tracking program — which was designed to record everything workers do on their work computer to gather data for AI — after sensitive employee information was leaked internally.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth vowed that the program would be “opt-in” if it’s ever turned on again.
“For people who are comfortable, that’s great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey,” he said at last week’s town hall. “To people who are not, it is not an issue.”
Despite major warning signs, Zuckerberg remains optimistic. According to the CEO, Meta could see major benefits from its steep AI investments in as little as three to six months from now — but given the story so far, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.
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