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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

#161

Post by TACIXAT »

daxfohl wrote: post #149
nonethewiser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I have this experience and read people maligning AI for coding, the more I think the junior developers are actually not the ones in danger.

Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams,…

I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t. architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an existing design, but they do not think through design consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of every six of their suggestions.

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

#162

Post by rafaelmn »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #124
verse wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You can't really compare to human performance because the failure modes and performance characteristics are so different.

In some instances you'll get results that are shockingly good (and in no time), in others you'll have a grueling experience going in circles over fundamental reasoning, where you'd probably fire any person on the spot for having that kind of a discussion chain.

And there's no learning between sessions or subject area mastery - results on the same topic can vary within same session (with relevant context included).

So if something is superhuman and subhuman a large percentage of time but there's no good way of telling which you'll get or how - the result isn't the average if you're trying to use the tool.

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

#163

Post by 4782626292283 »

segfaultex wrote: post #24

I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop. The same goes for code as well. I’ve explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local models/ tried less interactive “agents”/etc. it’s largely all slop. My coworkers who claim they’re shipping at warp speed using generati…

Ah, Gary Marcus, the 10x ninja whose hand-crafted bespoke code singlehandedly keeps his employer in business.

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

#164

Post by viking123 »

blibble wrote: post #52
drewbug01 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What, precisely, are they good for? scamming people

Also good for manufacturing consent in Reddit and other places. Intelligence services busy with certain country now, bots using LLMs to pump out insane amounts of content to mold the information atmosphere.

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

#165

Post by jhanschoo »

postalrat wrote: post #128
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…

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.

> It's a story and the readers perception changes over the course of reading the book.

You're referring to casual reading, but writers and people who have an interest and motivation to read deeply review, analyze, and summarize books under lenses and reflect on them; for technique as much as themes, messages, how well they capture a milieu, etc. So that's quite a bit more than "no human"!

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

#166

Post by viking123 »

hamdingers wrote: post #78
jbs789 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the likes of Altman have set short term expectations unrealistically high.

I maintain that most anti-AI sentiment is actually anti-lying-tech-CEO sentiment misattributed. The technology is neat, the people selling it are ghouls.

I hate the Anthropic guy so much.. when I see the face it just brings back all the nonsense lies and "predictions" he says. Altman is kind of the same but for some reason Dario kind of takes the cake.

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

#167

Post by mattmaroon »

nonethewiser wrote: post #136
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. Why? Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot. But I'm curious why he's doing this.

The codebase is old and really hard to work on. It’s a game that existed pre-iPhone and still has decent revenue but could use some updating. We intentionally shrank our company down to auto-pilot mode and frankly don’t even have a working development environment anymore.

It was basically cost prohibitive to change anything significant until Claude became able to do most of the work for us. My cofounder (also CTO of another startup in the interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and has been wowed by the results.

Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have self driving cars while millions of people actually have their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he already did) those who think AI coding is years away are missing what’s happening now. It’s a powerful force magnifier in the hands of a skilled programmer and it’ll only get better.

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

#168

Post by vlod »

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!

>my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.

I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one), to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert meme). :)

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

#169

Post by jamesfinlayson »

tombert wrote: post #106
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #83

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. 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…

I think that even if it never improves, its current state is already pretty useful. I do think it's going to improve though I don't think AGI is going to happen any time soon. I have no idea what this is called, but it feels like a lot of people assume that progress will continue at a linear pace for forever for things, when I think that generally progress is closer to a "staircase" shape. A new invention or discover…

Yes I've read about something like before - like the jump from living in 1800 to 1900 - you go from no electricity at home to having electricity at home for example. The jump from 1900 to 2000 is much less groundbreaking for the electricity example - you have more appliances and more reliable electricity but it's nothing like the jump from candle to light bulb.

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

#170

Post by atomic_reed »

pixl97 wrote: post #159
fxtentacle wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>let alone understand nuance or sarcasm I'm still trying to find humans that do this reliably too. To add on, 5.2 seems to be kind of lazy when reading text in images by default. Feeding it an image it may give the first word or so. But coming back with a prompt 'read all the text in the image' makes it do a better job. With one in particular that I tested I thought it was hallucinating some of the words, but there w…

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