Mark Zuckerberg says most AI agents don't pass the 'mother' test
· Business Insider
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that many AI agents showed promise — but weren't ready for his mom.
- "How do you make a version of that experience that is a lot more polished?" he asked on Meta's first-quarter earnings call.
- Zuckerberg also said that the company wasn't focused on building AI coding agents, a priority for Meta's competitors.
Your mom probably hasn't put an OpenClaw in her group chat yet. Mark Zuckerberg knows it.
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AI agents are having a moment. Techies are wearing lobster hats to meetups, and companies are onboarding AI employees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is excited about this progress — but says that many agents aren't yet accessible enough.
On Meta's first-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said that many of the existing agents don't pass one important test.
"There's a lot of agents out there," he said. "There aren't that many that I would want to give to my mother."
Those other agents offer a "very exciting glimpse" of what will be possible in the future, he said, but there's one major flaw: the agents are difficult to use.
Zuckerberg pointed to OpenClaw specifically. Users need to install a computer locally, access their computer's terminal, and then configure the system to use the AI agents. There were "small numbers of millions of people" in the world that are completing the set-up, he said, but Meta aims for the masses.
"How do you make a version of that experience that is a lot more polished and dialed and easy?" Zuckerberg asked. The agent they're focused on "just works," he said.
Passing that informal "mother" test — as in, a product you'd recommend for your mother that she could use — was more important than hitting a specific launch deadline, Zuckerberg said.
On the call, Zuckerberg also gave a glimpse into his position on investing resources into developing coding agents.
Meta's competitors have invested heavily in the coding agent race. OpenAI and Anthropic have Codex and Claude Code. SpaceX, which owns xAI, struck a $60 billion deal for the right to acquire the AI coding startup Cursor.
Zuckerberg said that Meta was "not necessarily" a developer tools company, though he wasn't against building a coding agent. It's not Meta's primary focus, though.
"People conflate coding with self-improvement more than they should," he said. "Coding is one ingredient for the model self improving. It's not the only thing."
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