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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

#191

Post by jbgt »

serf wrote: post #190
fxtentacle wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged.

I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting.

If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.

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

#192

Post by XenophileJKO »

daxfohl wrote: post #182
TACIXAT wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Knowing when to nudge it out of a rut (or say skip it) is probably the biggest current skill. This is why experienced people get generally much better results.

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

#193

Post by code_martial »

daxfohl wrote: post #182
TACIXAT wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back, “what’s your problem?” And most of the times it shoots my problems down showing exactly why rewriting won’t fix that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel Spolsky once!

Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.

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

#194

Post by rf15 »

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!

no need to wait, by using AI you already are mediocre at best (because you forego skill and quality for speed)

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

#195

Post by wolvoleo »

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…

When I say I want a self driving car I mean one that actually drives itself so I don't have to be involved other than setting the destination.

What Tesla is selling now is the worst of both worlds. You still have to pay attention but it's way more boring so it's really hard to do so. Well until it suddenly decides to ram a barrier at highway speeds.

Wake me up when I can have a beer and watch a movie while it's driving.

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

#196

Post by daxfohl »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #187
daxfohl wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hard to say. In business we'll still have to make hard decisions about unique situations, coordinate and align across teams and customers, deal with real world constraints and complex problems that aren't suitable to feed to an LLM and let it decide. In particular, deciding whether or not to trust an LLM with a task will itself always be a human decision. I think there will always be a place for analytical thinking in business even if LLMs do most of the actual engineering. If nothing else, the speed at which they work will require an increase in human analytical effort, to maximize their efficacy while maintaining safety and control.

In the academic world, and math in particular, I'm not sure. In a way, you could say it doesn't change anything because proofs already "exist" long before we discover them, so AI just streamlines that discovery. Many mathematicians say that asking the right questions is more important than finding the answers. In which case, maybe math turns into something more akin to philosophy or even creative writing, and equivalently follows the direction that we set for AI in those fields. Which is, perhaps less than one would think: while AI can write a novel and it could even be pretty good, part of the value of a novel is the implicit bond between the author and the audience. "Meaning" has less value coming from a machine. And so maybe math continues that way, computers solving the problems but humans determining the meaning.

Or maybe it all turns to shit and the sheer ubiquity of "masterpieces" of STEM/art everything renders all human endeavor pointless. Then the only thing that's left worth doing is for the greedy, the narcissists, and the power hungry to take the world back to the middle ages where knowledge and search for meaning take a back seat to tribalism and war mongering until the datacenters power needs destroy the planet.

I'm hoping for something more like the former, but, it's anybody's guess.

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

#197

Post by wolvoleo »

acdha wrote: post #84
hamdingers wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly: the technology is useful but because the executive class is hyping it as close to AGI because their buddies are slavering for layoffs. If that “when do you get fired?” tone wasn’t behind the conversation, I think a lot of people would be interested in applying LLMs to the smaller subset of things they actually perform well at.

For me it's mostly about the subset of things that LLMs suck at but still rammed in everywhere because someone wants to make a quick buck.

I know it's good tech for some stuff, just not for everything. It's the same with previous bubbles. VR is really great for some things but we were never going to work with a headset on 8 hours a day. Bitcoin is pretty cool but we were never going to do our shopping list on Blockchain. I'm just so sick of hypes.

But I do think it's good tech, just like I enjoy VR daily I do have my local LLM servers (I'm pretty anti cloud so I avoid it unless I really need the power)

It's not really about the societal impacts for me, at least not yet, it's just not good enough for that yet. I do worry about that longer-term but not with the current generation of AI. At my work we've done extensive benchmarking (especially among enthusiastic early adopters) and while it can save a couple hours a week we're nowhere near the point where it can displace FTEs.

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

#198

Post by thefz »

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.

If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the LLM that made the mistake first?

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

#199

Post by gloosx »

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!

>rewriting code

Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to rewrite.

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

#200

Post by array_key_first »

jbgt wrote: post #191
serf wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Slice THEIR hands. They might say yours are rigged. I'm a non dev and the things I'm building blow me away. I think many of these people criticizing are perhaps more on the execution side and have a legitimate craft they are protecting. If you're more on the managerial side, and I'd say a trusting manager not a show me your work kind, then you're more likely to be open and results oriented.

From a developer POV, or at least my developer POV, less code is always better. The best code is no code at all.

I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been burned so, so, so many times by that.

As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it should because everything is just squished together and barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point where even the most trivial of changes are close to impossible.

That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take you a decade to migrate off of it.

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