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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

#271

Post by kakacik »

Gud wrote: post #206
vips7L wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How are they “soul suckers”? Using LLMs has made it fun for me to make software again.

Shallow learning, overall laziness imprinted on the character over time. For kids and juniors starting the field they are much worse. None of the stuff I've learned over past 20 years was handed over to me in this easy fashion.

Overconfident and over-positive shallow posts just hurt the overall discussion. Also some layer of arrogance - a typical 'if you struggle to get any significant value out of this new toy you must be doing something horribly wrong, look at us all being 100x productive!' which is never ever followed by some detailed explanation of their stack and other details.

Clearly the tools have serious issues since most users struggle to get any sustained reliable added value, and everybody keeps hoping things will improve later due to it being able to write lengthy prose on various topics or fill our government documents.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] »

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!

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by gallerdude »

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…

> the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before.

Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.

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

#274

Post by jgalt212 »

raincole wrote: post #151
jgalt212 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment or something very close always appears alongside a Gary Marcus post.

And why not? Is there any reason for this comment to not appear? If Bill Gates made a predication about computing, no matter what the predication says, you can bet that 640K memory quote would be mentioned in the comment section (even he didn't actually say that).

becuase

- it's tiresome

- and the only less useful than making predictions is making predictions about predictions.

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

#275

Post by amanaplanacanal »

gallerdude wrote: post #273
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…

> the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while the poor remain constrained by them, as before. Claude Code is $20 a month, and I get a lot of usage out of it. I don't see how cutting edge AI tools are only for the rich. The name OpenAI is often mocked, but they did succeed at bringing the cutting edge of AI to everyone, time and time again.

Oh they will totally rent you their privilege, further enrichening themselves. Of course!

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

#276

Post by prewett »

BeetleB wrote: post #91
drewbug01 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your metric is an LLM that can copy/paste without alterations, and never hallucinate APIs, then yeah, you'll always be disappointed with them. I struggle to take comments like this seriously - yes, it is very reasonable to expect these magical tools to copy and paste something without alterations. How on earth is that an unreasonable ask? The whole discourse around LLMs is so utterly exhausting. If I say I don't…

For a long time, I've wanted to write a blog post on why programmers don't understand the utility of LLMs[1], whereas non-programmers easily see it. But I struggle to articulate it well. The gist is this: Programmers view computers as deterministic . They can't tolerate a tool that behaves differently from run to run. They have a very binary view of the world: If it can't satisfy this "basic" requirement, it's crap.…

My problem isn't lack of determinism, it's that it's solution frequently has basic errors that prevent it from working. I asked ChatGPT for a program to remove the background of an image. The resulting image was blue. When I pointed this out to ChatGPT it identified this as a common error in RGB ordering in OpenCV and told me the code to change. The whole process did not take very long, but this is not a cycle that is anything I want to be part of. (That, and it does not help me much to give me a basic usage of OpenCV that does not work for the complex background I wanted to remove)

Then there are the cases where I just cannot get it do what I ask. Ask Gemini to remove the background of an image and you get a JPEG with a backed in checkerboard background, even when you tell it to produce an RGBA PNG. Again, I don't have any use for that.

But it does know a lot of things, and sometimes it informs me of solutions I was not aware of. The code isn't great, but if I were non-technical (or not very good), this would be fantastic and better than I could do.

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

#277

Post by sidtrey »

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!

Senior developer here, your co-founder is making a huge mistake. Their lack of knowledge about the codebase will be your undoing. PS. I work in GenAI.

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

#278

Post by bloppe »

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…

I don't think LLMs are an abject failure, but I find it equally odd that so many people think that transformer-based LLMs can be incrementally improved to perfection. It seems pretty obvious to me now that we're not gonna RLHF our way out of hallucinations. We'll probably need a few more fundamental architecture breakthroughs to do that.

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

#279

Post by dmux »

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 feel like I'm living in a totally different world or I'm being gaslit by LLMs when I read stuff like this and other similar comments in this thread. Do you mind mentioning _what_ language / tech stack you're in? At my current job, we have a large Ruby on Rails codebase and just this week Gemini 2.5 and 3 struggled to even identify what classes inherited from another class.

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

#280

Post by reaperducer »

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.

Yay! Let's put all the artists out of business and funnel all the money to the tech industry. That's how to build a vibrant society. Yay!

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