Mark Zuckerberg admitted at an internal meeting on Thursday that Meta’s AI agents are not advancing as quickly as the company had hoped.
The CEO acknowledged during the town hall that the corporate restructuring did not go as smoothly as intended and that executives had underestimated the timeline. He noted that the progress over the last four months has not accelerated in the way they expected, and the new structure has not yet delivered results.
This admission comes after a year of aggressive investment. Zuckerberg placed Alexandr Wang in charge of the AI division, renamed it Meta Superintelligence Labs, and hired top talent with nine-figure contracts. In April, the company released Muse Spark, the first model in the new lineup. It achieved solid benchmark scores but did not match the performance of OpenAI or Anthropic.
Restructuring built around agents
Meta laid off roughly ten percent of its global workforce in May and moved about 7,000 employees into AI teams. The goal was to fund expensive AI infrastructure and squeeze efficiency gains from AI-powered workflows. When planning began in January and February, senior leaders worried they were not moving fast enough, according to Zuckerberg. At that time, executives were “super optimistic” about tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Meta plans to spend up to $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, a sizable chunk of the more than $700 billion Big Tech is pouring in collectively. Zuckerberg expects more tangible results within the next three to six months. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. According to Bloomberg, Meta is also building a cloud business to sell excess AI compute capacity to outside customers.
Meta’s AI chief pushes back
At the same town hall, AI chief Alexandr Wang struck a different tone, according to Business Insider. Meta’s upcoming model, code-named “Watermelon,” has caught up with OpenAI’s top model GPT-5.5, he said, citing benchmarks he did not specify. “Watermelon, our next model after Avocado, is currently in training,” Wang said, per Business Insider. “Watermelon uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado,” he added, referring to the internal code name for Muse Spark, which shipped in April.
On X, Wang went into damage-control mode. Zuckerberg was talking about the progress of the entire industry, not Meta’s AI efforts specifically, he said. A Muse Spark update with major improvements to coding and agentic capabilities is coming soon. A coding model on par with Anthropic’s Claude Opus is “pretty soon” to follow, and users will like what the team has been “cooking.”
Employee tracking for AI training remains unresolved
Separate from the model discussion, CTO Andrew Bosworth addressed Meta’s controversial mouse-tracking software at the same town hall. The tool records mouse movements and digital activity from employees to generate AI training data. Meta had paused the program after potentially sensitive data was exposed.
An internal review found that no employee data made it into AI training, Bosworth said. When Meta first installed the software on U.S. employees’ machines in April, he had told them there was no way to opt out.
If the program restarts after the review wraps up, it will run on an opt-in basis. “For people who are comfortable, that’s great, they can contribute to this kind of great human survey,” Bosworth said. “To people who are not, it is not an issue.”
What it means
For people building software and content, the delay means the new tools promised to automate complex tasks are not ready for prime time yet. The company is still in the training phase for its next model, which uses significantly more computing power than the current version. Until the update arrives, workers relying on Muse Spark for coding assistance will have to wait for improvements to its agentic capabilities.
