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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

#61

Post by kstrauser »

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 was a self confessed skeptic.

I think that's the key. Healthy skepticism is always appropriate. It's the outright cynicism that gets me. "AI will never be able to [...]", when I've been sitting here at work doing 2/3rds of those supposedly impossible things. Flawlessly? No, of course not! But I don't do those things flawlessly on the first pass, either.

Skepticism is good. I have no time or patience for cynics who dismiss the whole technology as impossible.

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

#62

Post by colechristensen »

gejose wrote: post #42

I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1] > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. > In 2029, AI will not be able to r…

Besides being a cook which is more of a robotics problem all of the rest are accomplished to the point of being arguable about how reliably LLMs can perform these tasks, the arguments being between the enthusiast and naysayer camps.

The keyword being "reliably" and what your threshold is for that. And what "bug free" means. Groups of expert humans struggle to write 10k lines of "bug free" code in the absolutist sense of perfection, even code with formal proofs can have "bugs" if you consider the specification not matching the actual needs of reality.

All but the robotics one are demonstrable in 2026 at least.

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

#63

Post by thethirdone »

gejose wrote: post #42

I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1] > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. > In 2029, AI will not be able to r…

Which ones of those have been achieved in your opinion?

I think the arbitrary proofs from mathematical literature is probably the most solved one. Research into IMO problems, and Lean formalization work have been pretty successful.

Then, probably reading a novel and answering questions is the next most successful.

Reliably constructing 10k bug free lines is probably the least successful. AI tends to produce more bugs than human programmers and I have yet to meet a programmer who can reliably produce less than 1 bug per 10k lines.

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

#64

Post by mschuster91 »

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!

The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models.

For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade.

But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in pension, having long since made their money. And my generation will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow keep stuff running.

Hell, it's already bad to get qualified human support these days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to consumer protection/regulatory authorities that are being gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI hallucinating case law.

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

#65

Post by ubercow13 »

drewbug01 wrote: post #32
BeetleB wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It seems like just such a weird and rigid way to evaluate it? I am a somewhat reasonable human coder, but I can't copy and paste a bunch of code without alterations from memory either. Can someone still find a use for me?

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

#66

Post by habinero »

fzeroracer wrote: post #33
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.

Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it.

The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!

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

#68

Post by saberience »

Gary Marcus (probably): "Hey this LLM isn't smarter than Einstein yet, it's not going all that well"

The goalposts keep getting pushed further and further every month. How many math and coding Olympiads and other benchmarks will LLMs need to dominate before people will actually admit that in some domains it's really quite good.

Sure, if you're a Nobel prize winner or PhD then LLMs aren't as good as you yet, but for 99% of the people in the world, LLMs are better than you at Math, Science, Coding, and every language probably except your native language, and it's probably better at you at that too...

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

#69

Post by xp84 »

falloutx wrote: post #53
tombert wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am an AI-skeptic but I would agree this looks impressive from certain angles, especially if you're an early startup (maybe) or you are very high up the chain and just want to focus on cutting costs. On the other hand, if you are about to be unemployed, this is less impressive. Can it replace a human? I would say no its still long way to go, but a good salesman can convince executives that it does and thats all that…

> On the other hand, if you are about to be unemployed, this is less impressive

> salesman can convince executives that it does

I tend to think that reality will temper this trend as the results develop. Replacing 10 engineers with one engineer using Cursor will result in a vast velocity hit. Replacing 5 engineers with 5 "agents" assigned to autonomously implement features will result in a mess eventually. (With current technology -- I have no idea what even 2027 AI will do). At that point those unemployed engineers will find their phones ringing off the hook to come and clean up the mess.

Not that unlike what happens in many situations where they fire teams and offshore the whole thing to a team of average developers 180 degrees of longitude away who don't have any domain knowledge of the business or connections to the stakeholders. The pendulum swings back in the other direction.

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

#70

Post by zozbot234 »

thethirdone wrote: post #63
gejose wrote: post #42

I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of his predictions from 2022 [1] > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. > In 2029, AI will not be able to r…

Which ones of those have been achieved in your opinion? I think the arbitrary proofs from mathematical literature is probably the most solved one. Research into IMO problems, and Lean formalization work have been pretty successful. Then, probably reading a novel and answering questions is the next most successful. Reliably constructing 10k bug free lines is probably the least successful. AI tends to produce more bugs…

Formalizing an arbitrary proof is incredibly hard. For one thing, you need to make sure that you've got at least a correct formal statement for all the prereqs you're relying on, or the whole thing becomes pointless. Many areas of math ouside of the very "cleanest" fields (meaning e.g. algebra, logic, combinatorics etc.) have not seen much success in formalizing existing theory developments.
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