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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

#171

Post by vips7L »

maccard wrote: post #113
Aurornis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re doing exactly the thing that the parent commenter pointed out: Complaining that they’re not perfect yet as if that’s damning evidence of failure. We all know LLMs get stuck. We know they hallucinate. We know they get things wrong. We know they get stuck in loops. There are two types of people: The first group learns to work within these limits and adapt to using them where they’re helpful while writing the cod…

Someone else said this perfectly farther down: > 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. As I’ve said, I use LLMs, and I use tools that are assisted by L…

Rather be a Luddite than contribute to these soul suckers like OpenAI and help them lay off workers.

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

#172

Post by mattmaroon »

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.

My cofounder is an all the way competent engineer. Making this many assumptions would horrify someone halfway competent with logic though.

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

#173

Post by tengbretson »

fxtentacle wrote: post #94
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To me, this sounds like:

If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task in the first place.

Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.

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

#174

Post by johnnienaked »

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…

You're saying the same thing cryptobros say about bitcoin right now, and that's 17 years later.

It's a business, but it won't be the thing the first movers thought it was.

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

#175

Post by johnnienaked »

tombert wrote: post #22
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…

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…

Ya but what do you do when there are no humans left?

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

#176

Post by sswatson »

merlincorey wrote: post #40
_vertigo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s well known and also wrong.

Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

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

#177

Post by windowpains »

aprdm wrote: post #26
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 !

That line on the chart labeled “profit” is really going to go up now!

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

#178

Post by kortilla »

sswatson wrote: post #176
merlincorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your example pretty bad.

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

#179

Post by simonsmithies »

kortilla wrote: post #178
sswatson wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your example pretty bad.

Not a terrible example. The planes delta owns are delta’s assets; the planes the leasing company owns are the leasing company’s assets. The point is, the code and the planes are assets despite the maintenance required to keep them in revenue-generating state.

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

#180

Post by OneMorePerson »

sswatson wrote: post #176
merlincorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

It's possible for something to be both an asset and a potential liability, it isn't strictly one or the other.
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