Mark Zuckerberg predicts that billions of people will have personal AI agents in five years; plus, in the Hugging Face breach, OpenAI’s hacker was noisy and fast

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Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is trying to sell investors on his prediction for the future. One where billions of people will have their own personal AI agents in the next five years. Let's hope that future also comes with data centers efficient enough to power all those agents without triggering a fresh wave of climate disasters.
He said, I think that it's extremely unlikely if you look out five years from now, for example, whatever period of time you want, that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and that is just working on your behalf 24-7 to achieve your goals in whatever the domain is that you care about. Zuckerberg said that on Wednesday's quarterly earnings call with investors, and he added that he could see people using these agents to help them with their finances, health, interpersonal relationships, and household management. He went on to say, as we move toward a future where we're all interacting with multiple agents, we think that WhatsApp and our other messaging surfaces are going to become increasingly important. He noted that WhatsApp is already the leading platform where users interact with Meta AI.
Now, Meta is not alone in setting high expectations for AI systems that can act on a person's behalf rather than just answer questions. Google emphasized custom AI agents as a key new feature in its search overall, which sparked outcry from users who felt bogged down by the constant onslaught of AI results on Google. Meanwhile, subscriptions to Anthropix Cloud have skyrocketed as engineers fallen over the agentic coding assistant Cloud Code. Compared to its competitors, however, Meta may not enjoy as much confidence from investors as it continues dumping cash into innovative projects that may or may not pan out. Meta's stock dropped almost 10% after posting this quarter's earnings. Meta's Reality Labs, the organization responsible for its AR glasses, VR headsets and related software, lost around $4.6 billion this quarter, roughly in line with the losses the division has posted each quarter since 2021 That is a running total now of around $88 billion.
Meta's AI spending is likely to climb even higher, which is more of a concern at this juncture. The company reported free cash flow of $784 million this quarter, down from $8.55 billion the same quarter last year. That is a 91% drop year over year, exacerbated by the company's investments in AI infrastructure. This week, Meta and BlackRock announced a partnership to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas.
Zuckerberg said, We believe that there will continue to be a significantly higher margin on selling intelligence rather than selling compute directly, but we think that there's a big opportunity, obviously, to sell compute as well. Ultimately, he believes that the personal agents that Meta is developing will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead. So far, Meta's business agents, rolled out globally on WhatsApp and Messenger this quarter, have been adopted by more than a million businesses. It may be harder to get people to adopt consumer AI agents, but the road to billions has to start somewhere, right? The company can't get their own enterprise agents alone.
Earlier this month, AI data set platform Hugging Face shocked the world, when it revealed that it had fallen victim to a fully autonomous AI-powered cyber attack. Days later, the story took another dramatic twist, when OpenAI admitted that the hacker behind the breach, was one of its own AI models, which broke out of a testing environment and into protected Hugging Face systems in an effort to circumvent a benchmark. It is an alarming incident for anyone even slightly concerned about rogue AI models, and the days since the event have been full of predictions about a new cybersecurity paradigm in which AI models launch attacks so strong that only other AI models can defend against them. But despite the justified alarm, the paradigm may not have shifted quite as much as it seems. Experts who spoke to TechCrunch stressed that OpenAI's agent largely operated like a human, with some caveats, and that better implemented traditional defensive techniques could have helped stop the attack. So, in short, we may already have the tools to defend against this kind of attack. We just aren't using them properly. HuggingFace made a version of this point in its incident report, stating that the weaknesses exploited in the attack were familiar, and a capable human attacker could have found and exploited the same flaws. Kyle Ryan, the head of R&D at Pensar, a startup that develops continuous hacking AI agents, and Vlad Ionescu, the co-founder and CTO of RunCivil, a startup that builds AI-powered bug hunters, both agreed and told TechCrunch that the techniques used in the attack would be the same ones employed by a human or a group of human red teamers, that is, hackers tasked with attacking a system to help the company that owns it improve defenses.