Katie Paul and Courtney Rozen, Reuters:

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged shortcomings in the company’s sweeping restructuring at an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the systems known as AI agents had not progressed as quickly as he had expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters.

[…]

In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and ​that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can ​execute tasks on behalf of a user.

A quintessentially Zuckerbergian premise: he pivots the whole company around whatever is the new thing, says oops, then reminds himself that nothing really matters as long as people keep looking at ads on Instagram.

For all Meta’s power and its massive base of users and ad buyers, the company’s YouTube channels are fascinating places. The main channel has a bunch of promo videos for the headlining products Meta wants people to associate with a world-changing company. There are corporate presentations hosted by Zuckerberg, ads for A.I. and glasses products, and little behind-the-scenes things, and all of them have hundreds-of-thousands to millions of views. That is what you would expect for an account with 456,000 subscribers and a household name. It really wants you to believe its leadership is made of visionary stuff.

But the way it actually makes its money — advertising — is nowhere to be found on that channel. For that, you need to go to the Meta for Business channel, which has a respectable 181,000 subscribers and lots of tips for how to use the company’s ad tools more effectively. But the view counts on those videos are, frankly, terrible. Most are in the dozens-to-hundreds; again, this is a channel with enough subscribers to get a famous silver plaque.

Meta can tell the world it is a revolutionary company while being internally honest about what it actually does. Many companies do that. But it is fairly troubling that Meta seemingly tricked itself into believing the external picture it paints.