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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

#241

Post by acdha »

wolvoleo wrote: post #197
acdha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blockch…

Yeah, I think those are coming from the same place: so many companies are trying to wedge LLMs into everything, especially contexts where you really need actual reasoning to accomplish a task, and it’s just such a “magic VC money fairy, pick us!” play that it distracts from the underlying tech opening up some text processing capabilities we would’ve thought were amazing a few years ago.

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

#242

Post by mattmaroon »

idiotsecant wrote: post #185
mattmaroon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, in both cases it takes someone to steer. It’s not a complete solution. Someone who can’t drive can’t just ride a Tesla around town and someone who can’t program can’t vibe code anything complex.

But if it can do 90% of the work for you, it is a serious force magnifier.

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

#243

Post by user34283 »

sensanaty wrote: post #225
user34283 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That seems very unimaginative to me. Does it? How exactly is the common Joe going to benefit from this world where the robots are doing the job he was doing before, as well as everyone else's job (aka, no more jobs for anyone )? Where exactly is the money going to come from to make sure Joe can still buy food? Why on earth would the people in power (aka the psychotic CxOs) care to expend any resources for Joe, once…

To me it's completely baffling how people imagine that with human labor largely going obsolete, we will just stick with capitalism and all workers go hungry in some dystopian fantasy.

Many cynics seem to believe rich people are demons with zero consideration for their fellow humans.

Rich and powerful persons are still people just like you, and they have an interest in keeping the general population happy. Not to mention that we have democratic mechanisms that give power to the masses.

We will obviously transition to a system where most of us can live a comfortable life without working a full time job, and it's going to be great.

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

#244

Post by mattmaroon »

ggfdh wrote: post #189
mattmaroon wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He’s simply building an entirely new app. The old codebase plods on untouched.

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

#245

Post by immibis »

adrian_b wrote: post #230
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!

All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained. You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems. I would have no problem…

Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.

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

#246

Post by immibis »

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…

Just look at the METR study. All predictions were massive time savings but all observations were massive time losses. That's why we don't believe you when you say you saved time.

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

#247

Post by blks »

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!

On design and photography? So you’re filling your product with slop images and graphics? Users won’t like it

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

#248

Post by jvanderbot »

immibis wrote: post #245
adrian_b wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the productivity enhancement provided by LLMs for programming is caused by circumventing the copyright restrictions of the programs on which they have been trained. You and anyone else could have avoided spending millions for programmer salaries, had you been allowed to reuse freely any of the many existing proprietary or open-source programs that solved the same or very similar problems. I would have no problem…

Then it really proves how much the economy would be booming if we abolished copyright, doesn't it? China ignores copyright too, and look at them surpassing us in all aspects of technology, while Western economies choose to sabotage themselves to keep money flowing upwards to old guys.

Well no, because copyright != cannot use.

"Available for use" and "Automatically rewritten to work in your codebase fairly well" is very different, so copyright is probably not the blocker technically

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

#249

Post by UncleMeat »

habinero wrote: post #66
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.

Every professional SWE is going to stare off into the middle distance, as they flashback to some PM or VP deciding to show everyone they still got it. The "how hard could it be" fallacy claims another!

This has become my new hell.

PM has an idea. PM vibe codes a demo of this idea. PM shows it to the VP. VP gets excited and says "when can we have this." I look at the idea and estimate it'll take two people six months. VP and PM say "what the heck, but AI built the demo in a weekend, you should be able to do this with one engineer in a month." I get one day closer to quitting.

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

#250

Post by jvanderbot »

merlincorey wrote: post #40
_vertigo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code is not an asset it's a liability, and code that no one has reviewed is even more of a liability. Code that solves problems and makes you money is by definition an asset. Whether or not the code in question does those things remains to be seen, but code is not strictly a liability or else no one would write it.

"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.

Code requires maintenance, which grows with codebase size, minus some decay over time. (LLMs do not change this, and might actually be more sensitive to this), So increasing code size, esp with new code, implies future costs, which meets the definition of a liability on a LOC kinda-sorta-basis.

It's not right but it's not wrong either. It at least was a useful way to think about code, and we'll see if that applies in LLM era.

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