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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

#121

Post by BeetleB »

maccard wrote: post #110
BeetleB wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I’m perfectly happy for my tooling to not be deterministic. I’m not happy for it to make up solutions that don’t exist, and get stuck in loops because of that. I use LLMs, I code with a mix of antigravity and Claude code depending on the task, but I feel like I’m living in a different reality when the code I get out of these tools _regularly just doesn’t work, at all_. And to the parents point, I’m doing something wr…

If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right? Isn't the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a sign that you find them a net positive? Or is it being imposed on you?

> And to the parents point, I’m doing something wrong for noticing that?

There's nothing wrong pointing out your experience. What the OP was implying was he expects them to be able to copy/paste reliably almost 100% of the time, and not hallucinate. I was merely pointing out that he'll never get that with LLMs, and that their inability to do so isn't a barrier to getting productive use out of them.

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

#122

Post by cmcaleer »

falloutx wrote: post #93
the-grump wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tel…

You’re moving the goalposts. Gary Marcus’ proposal was being able to ask: Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.

Which is a relatively trivial task for a current LLM.

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

#123

Post by sheeh »

didibus wrote: post #117

Ignoring the actual poor quality of this write-up, I think we don't know how well GenAI is going to be honest. I feel we've not been able to properly measure or assess it's actual impact yet. Even as I use it, and I use it everyday, I can't really assess its true impact. Am I more productive or less overall? I'm not too sure. Do I do higher quality work or lower quality work overall? I'm not too sure. All I know, it'…

And what do you think investors in OAI et al are expecting?

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

#124

Post by evrydayhustling »

verse wrote: post #105
bspammer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ran…

I agree with you but I'd point out that unless you've read the book it's difficult to know if the answer you got was accurate or it just kinda made it up. In my experience it makes stuff up. Like, it behaves as if any answer is better than no answer.

So do humans asked to answer tests. The appropriate thing is to compare to human performance at the same task.

At most of these comprehension tasks, AI is already superhuman (in part because Gary picked scaled tasks that humans are surprisingly bad at).

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

#125

Post by protocolture »

fxtentacle wrote: post #88
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 strongly disagree. I’ve yet to find an AI that can reliably summarise emails, let alone understand nuance or sarcasm. And I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 to describe an Instagram image. It didn’t even get the easily OCR-able text correct. Plus it completely failed to mention anything sports or stadium related. But it was looking at a cliche baseball photo taken by an fan inside the stadium.

I have had ChatGPT read text in an image, give me a 100% accurate result, and then claim not to have the ability and to have guessed the previous result when I ask it to do it again.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by postalrat »

zozbot234 wrote: post #60
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…

> 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…

No human reads a novel and evaluates it as a whole. It's a story and the readers perception changes over the course of reading the book. Current AI can certainly do that.

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

#129

Post by daveguy »

retrac wrote: post #119
bspammer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ran…

I've done similar loose experiments using a 19th century French novel I have read (L'Agonie by Jean Lombard), and which is quite obscure. There is no English translation of the novel published. Using Gemini Notebooks I've found it passable at summarizing chapters, listing characters, major theme and so on, and it can do this in English. "What is the symbolism of the Black Stone?" > In the sources, the Black Stone (re…

"quite obscure" doesn't mean there is nothing in the internet that directly addresses the question.

Here is an english analysis of the text that easily showed up in an internet search:

https://www.cantab.net/users/leonardo/Downloads/Varian%20Sym...

This source includes analysis of "the Black Stone."

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

#130

Post by daveguy »

cmcaleer wrote: post #122
falloutx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tel…

You’re moving the goalposts. Gary Marcus’ proposal was being able to ask: Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc. Which is a relatively trivial task for a current LLM.

The Gary Marcus proposal you refer to was about a novel, and not a codebase. I think GP's point is that motivations require analysis outside of the given (or derived) context window, which LLMs are essentially incapable of doing.
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