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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

#31

Post by _vertigo »

merlincorey wrote: post #25
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 hol…

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

Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.

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

#32

Post by drewbug01 »

BeetleB wrote: post #16
maccard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I struggle to take comments like this seriously - yes, it is very reasonable to expect these magical tools to copy and paste something without alterations. How on earth is that an unreasonable ask?

The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high.

What, precisely, are they good for?

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

#33

Post by fzeroracer »

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.

This is one of those statements that would horrify any halfway competent engineer. A cowboy coder going in, seeing a bunch of code and going 'I should rewrite this' is one of the biggest liabilities to any stable system.

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

#35

Post by kingstnap »

robertclaus wrote: post #11

Odds this was AI generated?

It's literally just four screenshots paired with this sentence.

> Trying to orient our economy and geopolitical policy around such shoddy technology — particularly on the unproven hopes that it will dramatically improve– is a mistake.

The screenshots are screenshots of real articles. The sentence is shorter than a typical prompt.

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

#36

Post by spaceywilly »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #21

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 15-3…

I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point is that AI will spread like any other technology. It’s not going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and more manual work, until one day we realize it’s everywhere and has become indispensable.

It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it’s not as if we suddenly don’t need the engineer anymore.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy

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

#37

Post by amw-zero »

I’m starting to think this take is legitimately insane.

As said in the article, a conservative estimate is that Gen AI can currently do 2.5% of all jobs in the entire economy. A technology that is really only a couple of years old. This is supposed to be _disappointing_? That’s millions of jobs _today_, in a totally nascent form.

I mean I understand skepticism, I’m not exactly in love with AI myself, but the world has literally been transformed.

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

#39

Post by [deleted] »

merlincorey wrote: post #25
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 hol…

[deleted]

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

#40

Post by merlincorey »

_vertigo wrote: post #31
merlincorey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hol…

> Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.

"Code is a liability. What the code does for you is an asset." as quoted from https://wiki.c2.com/?SoftwareAsLiability with Last edit December 17, 2013.

This discussion and distinction used to be well known, but I'm happy to help some people become "one of today's lucky 10,000" as quoted from https://xkcd.com/1053/ because it is indeed much more interesting than the alternative approach.

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