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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

#261

Post by alfonsodev »

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!

>I myself am saving a small fortune on design and photography and getting better results while doing it.

Is this because you are improving your already existing design and photography skills and business ?

Or have you bootstrapped from the scratch with AI ?

Do you mind sharing or giving a hint ?

Thanks!

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

#262

Post by Ygg2 »

_heimdall wrote: post #259
Ygg2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liability is also an economic term. As in, "The bank's assets (debt) are my liability, and my assets (house) are the bank's liability." I don't think it's a wrong quote. Code's behavior is the asset, and code's source is the liability. You want to achieve maximum functionality for minimal source code investment.

Sorry, my point wasn't that liability doesn't have a meaning in finance. My read of the quote is that it uses liability in the sense of risk not debt on a balance sheet. I could always be wrong though, that was just my interpretation of it. I don't get how code could be a liability in the financial sense, but I do get how every line of code risks bugs and other issues.

Sure, but all code is a potential future debt.

You wrote a music player that only allows one artist from list of all artists? Tech debt.

You wrote optimized assembly for x86_64? It's the year 2060, and we only support NGPU_ARM_N_LEG.

The moment your expectations change (which is all the time), your code needs to be changed, and effort isn't free.

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

#263

Post by colechristensen »

littlestymaar wrote: post #234
blharr wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in that case, why not summarize the previous chapters and then include that as context to the next chapter?

That's what I did, but the thing is the LLM has no way to know what details are important in the first chapter before seeing their importance in the later chapters, and so these details usually get discarded by the summarization process.

Which is why you go back and re-summarize a second time given the context of the important details found out in the first pass.

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

#264

Post by rerdavies »

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.

I am a (very) senior dev with decades of experience. And I, too, am blown away by the massive productivity gains I get from the use of coding AIs.

Part of the craft of being a good developer is keeping up with current technology. I can't help thinking that those who oppose AI are not protecting legitimate craft, but are covering up their own laziness when it comes to keeping up. It seems utterly inconceivable to me that anyone who has kept up would oppose this technology.

There is a huge difference between vibe coding and responsible professional use of AI coding assistants (the principle one, of course, being that AI-generated code DOES get reviewed by a human).

But that, being said, I am enormously supportive of vibe coding by amateur developers. Vibe coding is empowering technology that puts programming power into the hands of amateur developers, allowing them to solve the problems that they face in their day-to-day work. Something that we've been working toward for decades! Will it be professional-quality code? No. Of course not. Will it do what it needs to do? Invariably, yes.

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

#265

Post by Bridged7756 »

mattmaroon wrote: post #242
idiotsecant wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't mention it was rewriting the codebase from scratch. That's the consensus, that AI is only good at scaffolding.

Oh it can't do 90% of the work for you. It CAN type 90% of the work for you, but someone still has to read the code and know what the best course of action is, supposedly...... I suppose some people never learned to use their IDEs or to touch type so as to find LLMs such a crazy productivity boost.

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

#266

Post by j-bos »

vips7L wrote: post #171
maccard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else said this perfectly farther down: > The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't like them for almost any reason, I'm a luddite. If I complain about their shortcomings, I'm just using it wrong. If I try and use it the "right" way and it still gets extremely basic things wrong, then my expectations are too high. As I’ve said, I use LLMs, and I use tools that are assisted by L…

Rather be a Luddite than contribute to these soul suckers like OpenAI and help them lay off workers.

All tech work has been in service of laying off workers. Phone operator, bank teller, longshoreman (outside the US) all used to be serviceable careers to earn a lifetime.

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

#267

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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!

When I read the blog post, the impression I get is that the author is referring to the proposed "business" of licensing or selling "generative AI" (i.e., making money for the licensor or seller), not whether generative AI is saving money for any particular user

The author's second reference, an article from The Atlantic, describing the copyright liability issues with "generative AI", has been submitted to HN four times in the last week

AI Memorization Research (theatlantic.com)

2 points by tagyro 5 hours ago | flag | past | discuss

AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)

2 points by twalichiewicz 1 day ago | flag | past | 1 comment

AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)

3 points by palad1n 4 days ago | flag | past | 1 comment

AI's Memorization Crisis (theatlantic.com)

4 points by casparvitch 4 days ago | flag | past | discuss

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

#268

Post by daveguy »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #148
daveguy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be the same analysis to put it in a partially overlapping vector space. Not saying it wasn't a useful perspective shuffling in the vector space, but it definitely wasn't original. LLMs haven't solved any of the 2029 predictions as they were posited. But I expect some will be reached by 2029. The AI hype acts like all this is easy. Not by 2029 doesn't mean impossible or even most of the way there.

LLMs will never achieve anything as long as any victory can be hand waved away with "in the training set". Somehow these models have condensed the entire internet down to a few TB's, yet people aren't backing up their terabytes of personal data down to a couple MB using this same tech...wonder why

It wasn't a hand wave. I gave an exact source, which OP admitted was better.

They certainly haven't "condensed the entire internet into a few TBs". People aren't backing up their personal data to a few MB because your assumption is false.

Maybe when people stop hand waving abilities that aren't there we will better understand their use as a tool and not magic.

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

#269

Post by Bridged7756 »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #233
mschuster91 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is... you're going to deprive yourself of the talent chain in the long run, and so is everyone else who is switching over to AI, both generative like ChatGPT and transformative like the various translation, speech recognition/transcription or data wrangling models. For now, it works out for companies - but forward to, say, ten years in the future. There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to re…

> There won't be new intermediates or seniors any more to replace the ones that age out or quit the industry entirely in frustration of them not being there for actual creativity but to clean up AI slop, simply because there won't have been a pipeline of trainees and juniors for a decade. There are be plenty of self taught developers who didn't need any "traineeship". That proportion will increase even more with AI/L…

More like "Either slop or shut up". Classic startup culture, fuck processes and doing things right, it's all about larping and lying to investors. Damn right, your value as an engineer is all about how much slop you can churn out, I'd love (not) to be in a team filled with people like you.

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

#270

Post by golly_ned »

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…

Frankly I think the 'latest' generation of models from a lot of providers, which switch between 'fast' and 'thinking' modes, are really just the 'latest' because they encourage users to use cheaper inference by default. In chatgpt I still trust o3 the most. It gives me fewer flat-out wrong or nonsensical responses.

I'm suspecting that once these models hit 'good enough' for ~90% of users and use cases, the providers started optimizing for cost instead of quality, but still benchmark and advertise for quality.

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