AI agents will match 'good mid-level' engineers this year, says Mark Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this is the year artificial intelligence will start to make possible autonomous software engineering "agents" that can take over significant programming tasks.

"2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that has coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer," Zuckerberg told Wall Street analysts on the company's Wednesday evening earnings conference call. 

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"And this is going to be a profound milestone and potentially one of the most important innovations in history, as well as over time, potentially a very large market," Zuckerberg continued. "Whichever company builds this first, I think is going to have a meaningful advantage in deploying it to advance their AI research and shape the field. So that's another reason why I think that this year is going to set the course for the future."

Zuckerberg cautioned that the realization of such an agent won't play out until perhaps 2026.

"I don't think you're going to see this year an AI engineer that is extremely widely deployed, changing all of development. I think this is going to be the year where that really starts to become possible and lays the groundwork for a much more dramatic change in 2026 and beyond."

Zuckerberg is counting on Meta's open-source Llama large language model to achieve that goal. The latest version, Llama 4.0, is still in development but will lead the industry when it is released, he said. 

"Our goal with Llama 3 was to make open source competitive with closed models," said Zuckerberg. "And our goal for Llama 4 is to lead. Llama 4 will be natively multimodal. It's an omni model, and it will have agentic capabilities."

Zuckerberg disclosed that Meta's AI tool, which is integrated with Facebook and other apps, has an average of 700 million users per month. He projected that number would reach a billion by the end of 2025.

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"I expect that this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant," he said. 

Along the way, Meta AI will become "personalized," said Zuckerberg, becoming more specific to an individual's "context, their interests, their personality."

At the same time, Zuckerberg made the case that Llama will bring its own beneficial economics as it takes the lead in AI. 

"As Llama becomes more used," explained Zuckerberg, "It's more likely, for example, that silicon providers and others -- other APIs and developer platforms -- will optimize their work more for that and basically drive down the costs of using it and drive improvements that we can, in some cases, use too."

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Of course, Meta now faces open-source competition from China's DeepSeek AI model. When Zuckerberg was asked about DeepSeek, he responded with praise for the technology, noting that DeepSeek developers had "a number of novel things that they did that I think we're still digesting [and] a number of things that they have advanced that we will hope to implement in our systems." 

There will probably be a "global standard" for open-source AI, asserted Zuckerberg. 

"For our own national advantage, it's important that it's an American standard," he added. "So we take that seriously, and we want to build the AI system that people around the world are using."