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OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

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Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#51

Post by Ekaros »

inykt wrote: post #43
pzo wrote: post #35

> The models weren't allowed to access the internet How many software developers could solve most even simple programming problems (except 'Hello world') with zero shot style (you write in notepad then can compile only once and execute once) without access to internet (stackoverflow, google search, documentation), tools (terminal, debugger, linter, cli)? I think then it's not the best comparison to make any judgement…

These models are held at higher standards than humans. They should be above to solve any coding problem with just the documentation.

Isn't point of the training that they already have all the information they could have. So they do not need the Internet as on Internet there would only be information they already "know"...

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#52

Post by petesergeant »

deegles wrote: post #40
rurp wrote: post #36

I recently had to do a one-off task using SQL in a way that I wasn't too familiar with. Since I could explain conceptually what I needed but didn't know all the right syntax this seemed like a perfect use case to loop in Claude. The first couple back and forths went ok but it quickly gave me some SQL that was invalid. I sent back the exact error and line number and it responded by changing all of the aliases but repe…

I'm not convinced LLMs will evolve into general AI. The promises that it's just around the corner feels increasingly like a big scam.

Depends what you mean by evolve. I don't think we'll get general AI by simply scaling LLMs, but I think general AI, if it arrives, will be able to trace its lineage very much back to LLMs. Journeys through the embedding space very much feel like the way forward to me, and that's what LLMs are.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#53

Post by kristopolous »

deegles wrote: post #40
rurp wrote: post #36

I recently had to do a one-off task using SQL in a way that I wasn't too familiar with. Since I could explain conceptually what I needed but didn't know all the right syntax this seemed like a perfect use case to loop in Claude. The first couple back and forths went ok but it quickly gave me some SQL that was invalid. I sent back the exact error and line number and it responded by changing all of the aliases but repe…

I'm not convinced LLMs will evolve into general AI. The promises that it's just around the corner feels increasingly like a big scam.

I was never on board with it. It feels like the same step change google was - there was a time when it was just miles ahead of everything else out there around 1998. The first time you used it, it was like "geez, you got it right, didn't know that was possible". It's big, changed things, but wasn't an end of history event a bunch of people are utterly convinced this is.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#54

Post by a2128 »

pzo wrote: post #35

> The models weren't allowed to access the internet How many software developers could solve most even simple programming problems (except 'Hello world') with zero shot style (you write in notepad then can compile only once and execute once) without access to internet (stackoverflow, google search, documentation), tools (terminal, debugger, linter, cli)? I think then it's not the best comparison to make any judgement…

I think about this a lot. AI in the current state is like working with an intern who is on a stranded island with no internet access or compiler, they have to write down all of the code in forward sequence on piece of paper, god help them if they have to write any UI while also being blind. None of the "build an app with AI start-to-finish" products work well at all because of this.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#55

Post by internet101010 »

I believe it. I couldn't even get o1 or claude 3.5 to write a tampermonkey script that would turn off auto-scroll to bottom in LibreChat, even when uploading the html and javascript as context.

Apparently it has to do with overflow anchor or something in React? Idk. I gave up.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#56

Post by tkgally »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #19

Half of the work is specification and iteration. I think there’s a focus on full SWE replacement because it’s sensational, but we’ll more end up with SWE able to focus on the less patterned or ambiguous work and made way more productive with the LLM handling subtasks more efficiently. I don’t see how full SWE replacement can happen unless non-SWE people using LLMs become technical enough to get what they need out of…

> unless non-SWE people using LLMs become technical enough to get what they need out of them

Non-SWE person here. In the past year I've been able to use LLMs to do several tasks for which I previously would have paid a freelancer on Fiverr.

The most complex one, done last spring, involved writing a Python program that I ran on Google Colab to grab the OCR transcriptions of dozens of 19th-century books off the Internet Archive, send the transcriptions to Gemini 1.5, and collect Gemini's five-paragraph summary of each book.

If I had posted the job to Fiverr, I would have been willing to pay several hundred dollars for it. Instead, I was able to do it all myself with no knowledge of Python or previous experience with Google Colab. All it cost was my subscription to ChatGPT Plus (which I would have had anyway) and a few dollars of API usage.

I didn't put any full-time SWEs out of work, but I did take one job away from a Fiverr freelancer.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#57

Post by sky2224 »

pzo wrote: post #35

> The models weren't allowed to access the internet How many software developers could solve most even simple programming problems (except 'Hello world') with zero shot style (you write in notepad then can compile only once and execute once) without access to internet (stackoverflow, google search, documentation), tools (terminal, debugger, linter, cli)? I think then it's not the best comparison to make any judgement…

AI models are trained on the data from the internet, so sure, they couldn't do their search feature to scour the internet, but I doubt the material is much different than what the models were already trained on.

Additionally, before the age of stackoverflow and google, SWEs cracked open the book or documentation for whatever technology they were using.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#58

Post by brookst »

deegles wrote: post #40
rurp wrote: post #36

I recently had to do a one-off task using SQL in a way that I wasn't too familiar with. Since I could explain conceptually what I needed but didn't know all the right syntax this seemed like a perfect use case to loop in Claude. The first couple back and forths went ok but it quickly gave me some SQL that was invalid. I sent back the exact error and line number and it responded by changing all of the aliases but repe…

I'm not convinced LLMs will evolve into general AI. The promises that it's just around the corner feels increasingly like a big scam.

I mean it’s been a couple of years!

It may or may not happen but “scam” means intentional deceit. I don’t think anyone actually knows where LLMs are going with enough certainty to use that pejorative.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#59

Post by ipython »

nostrebored wrote: post #6

This mirrors what I've seen. I've found that LLMs are most helpful in places where I have the most experience. Maybe this is because of explicitness in prompt and preempting edge cases. Maybe it's because I know exactly what should be done. In these cases, I will still sometimes be surprised by a more complete answer then I was envisioning, a few edge cases that weren't front of mind. But if I have _no_ idea things g…

I just had this conversation with a customer. And it’s hard to avoid anthropomorphizing ai. Once you equate the ai system with a human - a human who creates perfectly pep8 formatted python is probably a decent python programmer, whereas someone who bangs out some barely readable code with mixed spacing and variable naming styles is most likely a novice.

We use these signals to indicate how much we should trust the code - same with written text. Poorly constructed sentences? Gaps or pauses? Maybe that person isn’t as knowledgeable.

These shortcuts fail miserably on a system that generates perfect grammar, so when you bring your stereotypes gleaned from dealing with humans into the ai world, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise when you unpack the info and find it’s only about 75% correct, despite the impeccable grammar.

Re: OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

#60

Post by ashu1461 »

rvz wrote: post #22

The benchmark for AI models to assess their 'coding' ability should be on actual real world production-grade repositories and fixing bugs in them such as the Linux kernel, Firefox, sqlite or other large scale well known repositories. Not these Hackerrank, Leetcode or previous IOI and IMO problems which we already have the solutions to them and reproducing the most optimal solution copied from someone else. If it can'…

The new Lancer benchmark is on actual problems and that is where it is failing by a huge margin.
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