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Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

garymarcus.substack.com

11–20 of 346 posts

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#12
post #5

Guessing this isn’t going to be popular here, but he’s right. AI has some use cases, but isn’t the world-changing paradigm shift it’s marketed as. It’s becoming clear the tech is ultimately just a tool, not a precursor to AGI.

If AGI is ever going to happen, then it's definitionally a precursor to it.

So I'm not really sure how to parse your statement.

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#13
It's going well for coding. I just knocked out a mapping project that would have been a week+ of work (with docs and stackoverflow opened in the background) in a few hours.

And yes, I do understand the code and what is happening and did have to make a couple of adjustments manually.

I don't know that reducing coding work justifies the current valuations, but I wouldn't say it's "not going all that well".

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#14
post #10

I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet. Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is g…

> Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving.

Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding. Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits. We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics.

It can one shot a web frontend, just like v0 could in 2023. But that's still about all I've seen it work on.

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#16
post #14
post #10

I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet. Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is g…

> Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just blows the last one out of the water for coding. Meanwhile, here I am with Opus and Sonnet for $20/mo and it's regularly failing at basic tasks, antigravity getting stuck in loops and burning credits. We're talking "copy basic exam…

> We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics.

If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them.

The rest of us learn how to be productive with them despite these problems.

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#17
post #12
post #5

Guessing this isn’t going to be popular here, but he’s right. AI has some use cases, but isn’t the world-changing paradigm shift it’s marketed as. It’s becoming clear the tech is ultimately just a tool, not a precursor to AGI.

If AGI is ever going to happen, then it's definitionally a precursor to it. So I'm not really sure how to parse your statement.

I’m not sure I follow. What if LLMs are helpful but not useful to AGI, but some other technology is? Seems likely.

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#18
This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to superficial reader's cognitive biases.

I work commercializing AI in some very specific use cases where it extremely valuable. Where people are being lead astray is layering generalizations: general use cases (copilots) deployed across general populations and generally not doing very well. But that's PMF stuff, not a failure of the underlying tech.

Re: Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well

#20
post #10

I find it a bit odd that people are acting like this stuff is an abject failure because it's not perfect yet. Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years, and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep improving. Yes, people have probably been deploying it in spots where it's not quite ready but it's myopic to act like it's "not going all that well" when it's pretty clear that it actually is g…

Because the likes of Altman have set short term expectations unrealistically high.
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