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

garymarcus.substack.com

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

#21

Post by 1a527dd5 »

A year ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly and I was a self confessed skeptic.

Then Gemini got good (around 2.5?), like I-turned-my-head good. I started to use it every week-ish, not to write code. But more like a tool (as you would a calculator).

More recently Opus 4.5 was released and now I'm using it every day to assist in code. It is regularly helping me take tasks that would have taken 6-12 hours down to 15-30 minutes with some minor prompting and hand holding.

I've not yet reached the point where I feel letting is loose and do the entire PR for me. But it's getting there.

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

#22

Post by tombert »

maccard wrote: post #14
tombert wrote: 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…

Sure, but think about what it's replacing.

If you hired a human, it will cost you thousands a week. Humans will also fail at basic tasks, get stuck in useless loops, and you still have to pay them for all that time.

For that matter, even if I'm not hiring anyone, I will still get stuck on projects and burn through the finite number of hours I have on this planet trying to figure stuff out and being wrong for a lot of it.

It's not perfect yet, but these coding models, in my mind, have gotten pretty good if you're specific about the requirements, and even if it misfires fairly often, they can still be useful, even if they're not perfect.

I've made this analogy before, but to me they're like really eager-to-please interns; not necessarily perfect, and there's even a fairly high risk you'll have to redo a lot of their work, but they can still be useful.

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

#24

Post by segfaultex »

I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop.

The same goes for code as well.

I’ve explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local models/ tried less interactive “agents”/etc. it’s largely all slop.

My coworkers who claim they’re shipping at warp speed using generative AI are almost categorically our worst developers by a mile.

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

#25

Post by merlincorey »

mattmaroon wrote: post #6

Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

> Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability.

However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hold in the short term.

The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.

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

#26

Post by aprdm »

mattmaroon wrote: post #6

Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or some designers. All of that in between meetings...

Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !

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

#28

Post by tombert »

jbs789 wrote: post #20
tombert wrote: 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.

I mean that's every tech company.

I made a joke once after the first time I watched one of those Apple announcement shows in 2018, where I said "it's kind of sad, because there won't be any problems for us to solve because the iPhone XS Max is going to solve all of them".

The US economy is pretty much a big vibes-based Ponzi scheme now, so I don't think we can single-out AI, I think we have to blame the fact that the CEOs running these things face no negative consequences for lying or embellishing and they do get rewarded for it because it will often bump the stock price.

Is Tesla really worth more than every other car company combined in any kind of objective sense? I don't think so, I think people really like it when Elon lies to them about stuff that will come out "next year", and they feel no need to punish him economically.

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

#29

Post by segfaultex »

mattmaroon wrote: post #6

Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks. I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it. If this is not all that well I can’t wait until we get to mediocre!

Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and planning.

Producing a lot of code isn’t proof of anything.

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

#30

Post by avaer »

alex_young wrote: post #17
avaer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The comment wasn't referencing LLMs, but generative AI.

Even then, given the deep impact of LLMs and how many people are using them already, it's a stretch to say LLMs will have no effect on the development of AGI.

I think it's pretty obvious that AGI requires something more than LLMs, but I think it's equally obvious LLMs will have been involved in its development somewhere, even if just a stepping stone. So, a "precursor".

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