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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

#211

Post by moonshotideas »

How long do you think it will be until the “ai isn’t doing anything” people are going away 1 month, 6 months, I’d say 1 Year at the most, anyone who has used Claude code since Dec 1st knows this in their bones, so I’d just let these people shout from the top of the hill until they run out of steam…

Right around then, we can send a bunch of reconnaissance teams out to the abandoned Japanese islands to rescue them from the war that’s been over for 10 years - hopefully they can rejoin society, merge back with reality and get on with their lives

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

#213

Post by mawadev »

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!

Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to say this publicly as this says more about you and your company. The question would be what your code does and if it is profitable.

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

#214

Post by user34283 »

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…

I have a hard time believing that this v0, from 2023, achieved comparable results to Gemini 3 in Web design.

Gemini now often produces output that looks significantly better than what I could produce manually, and I'm an expert for web, although my expertise is more in tooling and package management.

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

#215

Post by RamblingCTO »

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!

In this thread: people throwing shade on tech that works, comparing it to a perfect world and making weird assumptions like no tests, no E2E or manual testing just to make a case. Hot take: most SWEs produce shit code, be it by constraints of any kind or their own abilities. LLMs do the same but cost less and can move faster. If you know how to use it, code will be fine. Code is a commodity and a lot of people will be blindsided by that in the future. If your value proposition is translating requirements into code, I feel sorry for you. The output quality of the LLM depends on the abilities of the operator. And most SWEs lack the system thinking to be good here, in my experience.

As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad. You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their jobs.

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

#216

Post by Zababa »

merlincorey wrote: post #25
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. Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. However, in the end, execution is all that matters so if you and your cofounder are able to execute successfully with mountains of generated code then it doesn't matter what assets and liabilities you hol…

>Code is not an asset it's a liability

This would imply companies could delete all their code and do better, which doesn't seem true?

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

#217

Post by user34283 »

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?

If machines taking over labor and allowing humans to live a life of plenty instead of slaving away in jobs isn't exciting, then I don't know what is.

I guess cynics will yap about capitalism and how this supposedly benefits only the rich. That seems very unimaginative to me.

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

#218

Post by sublinear »

kstrauser wrote: post #61
1a527dd5 wrote: post #21

A year ago I would have agreed wholeheartedly and I was a self confessed skeptic. Then Gemini got good (around 2.5?), like I-turned-my-head good. I started to use it every week-ish, not to write code. But more like a tool (as you would a calculator). More recently Opus 4.5 was released and now I'm using it every day to assist in code. It is regularly helping me take tasks that would have taken 6-12 hours down to 15-3…

> I was a self confessed skeptic. I think that's the key. Healthy skepticism is always appropriate. It's the outright cynicism that gets me. "AI will never be able to [...]", when I've been sitting here at work doing 2/3rds of those supposedly impossible things. Flawlessly? No, of course not! But I don't do those things flawlessly on the first pass, either. Skepticism is good. I have no time or patience for cynics wh…

I think the concern expressed as "impossible" is whether it can ever do those things "flawlessly" because that's what we actually need from its output. Otherwise a more experienced human is forced to do double work figuring out where it's wrong and then fixing it.

This is not a lofty goal. It's what we always expect from a competent human regardless of the number of passes it takes them. This is not what we get from LLMs in the same amount time it takes a human to do the work unassisted. If it's impossible then there is no amount of time that would ever get this result from this type of AI. This matters because it means the human is forced to still be in the loop, not saving time, and forced to work harder than just not using it.

I don't mean "flawless" in the sense that there cannot be improvements. I mean that the result should be what was expected for all possible inputs, and when inspected for bugs there are reasonable and subtle technical misunderstandings at the root of them (true bugs that are possibly undocumented or undefined behavior) and not a mess of additional linguistic ones or misuse. This is the stronger definition of what people mean by "hallucination", and it is absolutely not fixed and there has been no progress made on it either. No amount of prompting or prayer can work around it.

This game of AI whack-a-mole really is a waste of time in so many cases. I would not bet on statistical models being anything more than what they are.

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

#219

Post by alextingle »

idreyn wrote: post #75
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…

Yes. I am a novelist and I noticed a step change in what was possible here around Claude Sonnet 3.7 in terms of being able to analyze my own unpublished work for theme, implicit motivations, subtext, etc -- without having any pre-digested analysis of the work in its training data.

How do you get a novel sized file into Claude? I've tried, and it always complains it's too long.

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

#220

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

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.

You are assuming a lot of things.

The work was moving the many landing pages & content elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10 year old website, with a very large custom WordPress codebase and many plugins.

The content is still in WordPress backend & will be migrated in the second phase.

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