Mark Zuckerberg told employees that AI agents were not progressing as quickly as he had hoped

Replacing people with artificial intelligence does not seem easy, if Meta is an example.

In an internal town hall on Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that the pace of AI agent development had not “accelerated in the way” executives had previously expected, Reuters reported.

Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 8,000 employees — roughly 10% of the company’s workforce — and reassigned another 7,000 to various AI groups, including one called Agent Transformation, Bloomberg reported.

During a meeting this week, Zuckerberg appeared to comment on these job cuts — noting that they were not as “clean” as they could have been. Zuckerberg added that the cuts were made because the company’s top brass “were concerned that we wouldn’t move fast enough to adapt” to the changing landscape of the tech industry.

The company’s leader also appeared to say that the notable upside of the new AI-focused company structure “has not yet come to fruition,” though he said he believes the company will start to see improvements from its AI investments over the next three to six months. Numerous other investigative reports have depicted Meta’s months-old AI unit as a soul-crushing gulag, according to some of the engineers hired for it.

Meta has invested heavily in AI, and is expected to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, Reuters reports.

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.