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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

#181

Post by oenton »

vlod wrote: post #168
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). :)

> and dare I say it "web scale"

Obligatory reference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

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

#182

Post by daxfohl »

TACIXAT wrote: post #161
daxfohl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They've gotten pretty good IME so long as you guide it to think out of the box, give it the right level of background info, have it provide alternatives instead of recommendations, and do your best not to bias it in any particular direction.

That said, the thing it really struggles with is when the best approach is "do nothing". Which, given that a huge chunk of principal level work is in deciding what NOT to do, it may be a while before LLMs can viably take that role. A principal LLM based on current tech would approve every idea that comes across it, and moreover sell each of them as "the exact best thing needed by the organization right now!"

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

#183

Post by _heimdall »

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.

You're hinting at the underlying problem with the quote. "Asset" in the quote reads, at least to me, in the financial or accounting meaning of the term. "Liability" reads, again to me, in the sense of potential risk rather than the financial meaning. Its apples and oranges.

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

#184

Post by tombert »

Terr_ wrote: post #143
tombert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that's every tech company. I made a joke once after the first time I watched one of those Apple announcement shows in 2018, where I said "it's kind of sad, because there won't be any problems for us to solve because the iPhone XS Max is going to solve all of them". The US economy is pretty much a big vibes-based Ponzi scheme now, so I don't think we can single-out AI, I think we have to blame the fact that the…

"Ponzi" requires records fraud and is popularly misused, sort of like if people started describing every software bug as "a stack overflow." I'd rather characterize it as extremes of Greater Fool Theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

I would argue it’s fraud-adjacent. These tech CEOs know that they’re not going to be able to keep the promises that they’re making. It’s dishonest at the very least, if it doesn’t legally constitute “fraud”.

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

#185

Post by idiotsecant »

mattmaroon wrote: post #167
nonethewiser wrote: post #136

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. 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…

I agree that code is being written in exactly the same sense that Teslas are driving themselves.

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

#186

Post by tombert »

johnnienaked wrote: post #174
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.

It’s different in that Bitcoin was never useful in any capacity when it was new. AI is at least useful right now and it’s improved considerably in the last few years.

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

#187

Post by nullpoint420 »

daxfohl wrote: post #142
spaceywilly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Though I think it's a very steep sigmoid that we're still far on the bottom half of. For math it just did its first "almost independent" Erdos problem. In a couple months it'll probably do another, then maybe one each month for a while, then one morning we'll wake up and find whoom it solved 20 overnight and is spitting them out by the hour. For software it's been "curiosity ... curiosity ... curiosity ... occasional…

And then what? Am I supposed to be excited about this future?

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

#188

Post by phito »

mattmaroon wrote: post #172
fzeroracer wrote: post #33

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. 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.

It's crazy how some people here will just make all the assumptions possible in order to refuse to believe you. Anyone who's used a good model with open code or equivalent will know that it's plausible. Refactoring is really cheap now when paired with someone competent.

I'm doing the same as your co-founder currently. In a few days, I've rewritten old code that took previous employees months to do. Their implementation sucked and barely worked, the new one is so much better and has tests to prove it.

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

#189

Post by ggfdh »

mattmaroon wrote: post #167
nonethewiser wrote: post #136

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. 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…

Do you have tests at least? Seems reckless to yolo the codebase if you don’t or can’t test easily.

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

#190

Post by serf »

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.

it's wild that somehow with regards to AI conversations lately someone can say "I saved 3 months doing X" and someone can willfully and thoughtfully reply "No you didn't , you're wrong." without hesitation.

I feel bad for AI opponents mostly because it seems like the drive to be against the thing is stronger than the drive towards fact or even kindness.

My .02c: I am saving months of efforts using AI tools to fix old (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.

I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.

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