Last year, Meta spent hundreds of millions poaching talent from rival artificial intelligence (AI) companies to speed up its AI development. Under the Meta Superintelligence Labs initiative, the focus is on creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) and AI agents that it hopes will give Meta an edge.
But in a staff meeting held yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the development of AI agents hasn't progressed as fast as expected in the past four months. The AI agents Meta is developing are expected to take over the tasks of human employees.
The AI agent development project has sparked controversy after Meta reportedly installed a system to record employees' mouse and keyboard movements to train models. The data collection project was recently halted after data leaks emerged.
Zuckerberg also said that the massive restructuring process, including layoffs, was not carried out as systematically as planned and there were timing errors. Meta has laid off more than 8,000 employees this year as it focuses on AI development. Employees in Metamesta and Reality Labs are among the hardest hit.
Although AI has received the most attention from major technology companies in the world, it is now clear that large investments do not necessarily result in the best products. xAI was absorbed into SpaceX with Elon Musk admitting that its construction was not done properly and that the resulting products failed to generate revenue. OpenAI, meanwhile, is seeing its momentum dwindle and funding dwindle.
