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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

#91

Post by BeetleB »

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…

For a long time, I've wanted to write a blog post on why programmers don't understand the utility of LLMs[1], whereas non-programmers easily see it. But I struggle to articulate it well.

The gist is this: Programmers view computers as deterministic. They can't tolerate a tool that behaves differently from run to run. They have a very binary view of the world: If it can't satisfy this "basic" requirement, it's crap.

Programmers have made their career (and possibly life) being experts at solving problems that greatly benefit from determinism. A problem that doesn't - well either that needs to be solved by sophisticated machine learning, or by a human. They're trained on essentially ignoring those problems - it's not their expertise.

And so they get really thrown off when people use computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a deterministic problem.

For everyone else, the world, and its solutions, are mostly non-deterministic. When they solve a problem, or when they pay people to solve a problem, the guarantees are much lower. They don't expect perfection every time.

When a normal human asks a programmer to make a change, they understand that communication is lossy, and even if it isn't, programmers make mistakes.

Using a tool like an LLM is like any other tool. Or like asking any other human to do something.

For programmers, it's a cardinal sin if the tool is unpredictable. So they dismiss it. For everyone else, it's just another tool. They embrace it.

[1] This, of course, is changing as they become better at coding.

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

#92

Post by bspammer »

merlincorey wrote: post #59
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 are you claiming have already been achieved? My understanding of the current scorecard is that he's still technically correct, though I agree with you there is velocity heading towards some of these things being proven wrong by 2029. For example, in the recent thread about LLMs and solving an Erdos problem I remember reading in the comments that it was confirmed there were multiple LLMs involved as well as…

The bug-free code one feels unfalsifiable to me. How do you prove that 10,000 lines of code is bug-free, and then there's a million caveats about what a bug actually is and how we define one.

The second claim about novels seems obviously achieved to me. I just pasted a random obscure novel from project gutenberg into a file and asked claude questions about the characters, and then asked about the motivations of a random side-character. It gave a good answer, I'd recommend trying it yourself.

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

#93

Post by falloutx »

the-grump wrote: post #74
zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI. Can AI actually do this? This looks like a nice benchmark for complex language processing, since a complete novel takes up a whole lot of context (consider War and Peace or The Count of Monte Cristo ). Of cou…

Yes they can. The size of many codebases is much larger and LLMs can handle those. Consider also that they can generate summaries and tackle the novel piecemeal, just like a human would. Re: movies. Get YouTube premium and ask YouTube to summarize a 2hr video for you.

Novel is different from a codebase. In code you can have a relationship between files and most files can be ignored depending on what you're doing. But for a novel, its a sequential thing, in most cases A leads to B and B leads to C and so on.

> Re: movies. Get YouTube premium and ask YouTube to summarize a 2hr video for you.

This is different from watching a movie. Can it tell what suit actor was wearing? Can it tell what the actor's face looked like? Summarising and watching are too different things.

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

#94

Post by fxtentacle »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #81
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…

Developers that can’t see the change are blind. Just this week, sun-tue. I added a fully functional subscription model to an existing platform, build out a bulk async elasticjs indexing for a huge database and migrated a very large Wordpress website to NextJS. 2.5 days, would have cost me at least a month 2 years ago.

To me, this sounds like:

AI is helping me solve all the issues that using AI has caused.

Wordpress has a pretty good export and Markdown is widely supported. If you estimate 1 month of work to get that into NextJS, then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.

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

#95

Post by sheeh »

segfaultex wrote: post #29
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.

Yep. Let’s see the projects and more importantly the incremental returns…

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

#96

Post by 1970-01-01 »

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…

>and is likely to keep improving.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but how did you arrive at 'keep improving' as a conclusion? Nobody is really sure how this stuff actually works. That's why AI safety was such a big deal a few years ago.

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

#97

Post by sheeh »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #83
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. I think the big problem is that the pace of improvement was UNBELIEVABLE for about 4 years, and it appears to have plateaued to almost nothing. ChatGPT has barely improved in, what, 6 months or so. They are driving costs down incredibly, which is not nothing. But, here's the thing, they're…

They are focused on reducing costs in order to survive. Pure and simple.

Alphabet / Google doesn’t have that issue. OAI and other money losing firms do.

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

#98

Post by sheeh »

spaceywilly wrote: post #36
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 s…

AI first of all is not a technology.

Can people get their words straight before typing?

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

#99

Post by throw310822 »

meowface wrote: post #34

How on Earth do people keep taking Gary Marcus seriously?

He's such a joke that even LLMs make fun of him. The Gemini-generated Hacker News frontpage for December 9 2035 contains an article by Gary Marcus: "AI progress is stalling": https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news

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

#100

Post by CjHuber »

falloutx wrote: post #90
stingrae wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 and 2 have been achieved. 4 is close, the interface needs some work to allow nontechnical people use it. (claude code)

I dispute 1 & 2 more than 4. 1) Is it actually watching a movie frame by frame or just searching about it and then giving you the answer? 2) Again can it handle very long novels, context windows are limited and it can easily miss something. Where is the proof for this? 4 is probably solved 4) This is more on predictor because this is easy to game. you can create some gibberish code with LLM today that is 10k lines lo…

I think all of those are terrible indicators, 1 and 2 for example only measure how well LLMs can handle long context sizes.

If a movie or novel is famous the training data is already full of commentary and interpretations of them.

If its something not in the training data, well I don't know many movies or books that use only motives that no other piece of content before them used, so interpreting based on what is similar in the training data still produces good results.

EDIT: With 1 I meant using a transcript of the Audio Description of the movie. If he really meant watch a movie I'd say thats even sillier because well of course we could get another Agent to first generate the Audio Description, which definitely is possible currently.

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