Mark Zuckerberg said that AI agent progress has been slower than expected in an internal town hall

• Mark Zuckerberg told staff Meta's "journey to superintelligence" is on track, but will take time.
• Meta is making its AI training program opt-in, CTO Andrew Bosworth said, after a leak and backlash.
• Bosworth also acknowledged morale issues at the company.

Superintelligence at Meta is coming. But it's going to take a bit of time and elbow grease, first.

That's what the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees at an internal town hall on Thursday, according to two sources who listened in.

Meta is pouring vast resources into AI, but progress on AI agent technology hasn't moved as quickly as the company expected, Zuckerberg said, in comments first reported by Reuters.

Meta's latest internal reset shows the tension at the heart of the company's evolving AI strategy. Zuckerberg and his team are racing to build AI models and pouring tens of billions of dollars into talent and infrastructure. But the company is also learning that moving fast has costs.

As Meta pushes employees to accelerate AI development, it's increasingly having to balance speed with trust, morale, and the buy-in of the workforce expected to build it.

Even so, Meta still remains on a "journey to superintelligence," Zuckerberg told staff in the town hall, adding that the company expects to see some benefits within the next three to six months according to an employee on the call. That journey will take hard work, Zuckerberg said, pointing to just how competitive the AI landscape has become,

Meta declined to comment.

Meta is also walking back one of the more contentious pieces of its AI push. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told the town hall that the company's AI training program, which used employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to train its models, will be opt-in only if and when it resumes, a person on the call said.

Business Insider previously reported that the mandatory version sparked a backlash from employees who were uncomfortable with their activity being recorded. Meta paused the program last month after an internal leak exposed employee conversations and keystrokes to their colleagues.

Bosworth acknowledged the rollout had damaged morale and trust within the company. But he said it had also generated more useful data than expected, enough, he suggested, that Meta hadn't needed to deploy it as broadly as it did.

The reversal echoes another recent retreat: last month, Meta gave engineers the option to leave its Applied AI task force, after having reassigned thousands of them to the unit — a climbdown some employees dubbed "the undraft."

That move came weeks after Bosworth warned staff that morale was "probably one of the worst it's ever been" in Meta's 20-year history — and after Meta laid off 10% of its staff, roughly 8,000 people, in May.

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