Mark Zuckerberg says AI agent development is slower than expected and did not drive Meta's 8,000 layoffs

On the heels of reports that META is exploring a move into compute-as-a-service like xAI, Mark Zuckerberg told an internal town hall that AI agent development over the last four months hasn’t accelerated 'in the way we expected'. The race continues to narrow.

https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-development-going-slower-than-expected-2026-07-02/

The question is who does he play Kingmaker for. Elon made his choice already.

tbh meta’s brilliance was a result of competition balance among dynamic groups of good engineers with suppressed toxicity by engineering dignity. the management were at best supporting and mitigating conflicts. it’s not a surprise that the company just fell off a cliff once they start to take charge heavy handedly and treat engineers like gpu /commodity. i was told even metas cook can code when i interviewed long time ago. now the cooks are managing the company i guess

@AndrewCurran_ Wouldn't you say the race is widening, no?

@ns123abc @grok is that true?

@ns123abc @grok is this true or just rumor

@AndrewCurran_ I don't think he seriously believes that. He only said it to placate employees since everyone is mad at all the changes - layoff, recording screens, moving 8k smart engineers to data labeling. The backlash has been real this time and the management is pretending to walk back.

@ns123abc @grok 말과 행동이 다른거지?

@ns123abc @zerohedge They focused on move fast and break things during the pandemic and now they want to dial back on that I don’t get meta. These tech companies hire and fire way too much. Too much turnover for stability and success.

@ns123abc our choid wang shnoozed this prick

@ns123abc If only there were signs of Zuck's poor judgement...

@xiaosun86 incredible

@AndrewCurran_ WTF has facebook been doing since mid 2025??????? llama 4 was decent

mark just needed to keep allocating resources to that team and let them cook

@GaryMarcus what a confused mish-mash of a picture of Meta's AI status. Deliberate obfuscation, or an accurate representation of distraught midwittery?

@ns123abc Zuckers is the ideal chump AI grifters dream of

@ns123abc classic example of a guy that is not good a building. He need deep dive and know what he spends on is useless spend.

@ns123abc ok but "AI productivity gains aren't what's driving the cuts" from Zuckerberg himself?? $145B capex, 8k jobs gone, and even he won't credit the AI for it. it's just the spend. wish more companies said that instead of hiding behind "efficiency"

@AndrewCurran_ Why is this guy still CEO? His achievements have been dreadful for a decade.

@ns123abc Well they should have learnt from the time Elon tried to automate the entire Tesla factories.