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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

#281

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #169
tombert wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that even if it never improves, its current state is already pretty useful. I do think it's going to improve though I don't think AGI is going to happen any time soon. I have no idea what this is called, but it feels like a lot of people assume that progress will continue at a linear pace for forever for things, when I think that generally progress is closer to a "staircase" shape. A new invention or discover…

Yes I've read about something like before - like the jump from living in 1800 to 1900 - you go from no electricity at home to having electricity at home for example. The jump from 1900 to 2000 is much less groundbreaking for the electricity example - you have more appliances and more reliable electricity but it's nothing like the jump from candle to light bulb.

Arguably the jump around the space age is a bigger jump than everything else between ~1900 and now - whenever you want to define that small period.

We may be in a similar step-jump period now, where over the next 10-15 years we'll see some pretty big advancements in robotics due to AI, and then all of the low hanging fruit will be picked until there some other MAJOR breakthrough

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

#282

Post by idreyn »

alextingle wrote: post #219
idreyn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I noticed a step change in what was possible here around Claude Sonnet 3.7 in terms of being able to analyze my own unpublished work for theme, implicit motivations, subtext, etc -- without having any pre-digested analysis of the work in its training data.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

My word count has hovered around 100k for most of my three years of writing and revising. This does sometimes run up against limits on Claude (or recently, with Opus 4.5, compaction) but in the past the whole thing has fit just fine as a plain text file.

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

#283

Post by demorro »

rpowers wrote: post #47

I keep reading comments that claim GenAI's positive traits, but this usually amounts to some toy PoC that very eerily mirrors work found in code bootcamps. You want an app that has logins and comments and upvotes? GenAI is going to look amazing setting up a non-relational db to your node backend.

Aye. If you've not turned a real profit with your thing, I will default to believing that you don't know what you're talking about and are probably building toys.

It's nothing to do with AI. I didn't believe "I rewrote my application in three weeks!" claims before AI, and I don't believe them now. Most people are not able to evaluate themselves, I don't see why that would have changed.

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

#284

Post by littlestymaar »

colechristensen wrote: post #263
littlestymaar wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it would work, as I said, but that wouldn't fit the original challenge description anymore IMO.

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

#285

Post by nonethewiser »

daxfohl wrote: post #149
nonethewiser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I have this experience and read people maligning AI for coding, the more I think the junior developers are actually not the ones in danger.

Oh I've thought this for years. As an L7, basically my primary role is to serve as someone to bounce ideas off of, and to make recommendations based on experience. A chatbot, with its virtually infinite supply of experience, could ostensibly replace my role way sooner than it could a solid junior/mid-level coder. The main thing it needs is a consistent vision and direction that aligns with the needs of nearby teams,…

I dont think it's a replacement for that but it's definitely provides some of it. Whereas senior+ level people were required before.

I think that's sort of a theme with LLMs. It's not that it's better than "the real thing" (in this case a senior+ software engineer) or that its without flaws... but it's a fucking service. Having just a semblance of an advanced software engineer in your pocket is a game changer. It doesn't need to be perfect or better than the real thing to fundamentally change things.

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

#286

Post by xnx »

rf15 wrote: post #194
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)

Is this also true of carpenters who use circular saws and airguns instead of hand saws and hammers?

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

#287

Post by 6510 »

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.

There is much going on in that exchange.

I don't even know what a Wordpress site is anymore.

> then maybe the latter is not a suitable choice.

But now it only takes days which makes it suitable?

There also is the paradoxical question if it is worth the time from someone who knows what they are doing? how would you even tell?

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

#288

Post by mattmaroon »

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.

My cofounder said his plan is $100 a month and if it were $1,000 he’d still pay it.

So much of programming is tedium.

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

#289

Post by mattmaroon »

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.

The theory behind copyright is that the enshrined monopoly guarantees profits and thus encourages r&d.

China steals our r&d (both copyrighted and non) and gets a lot of theirs from state funding.

I don’t think I’d take China’s success as proof that the copyright system doesn’t work.

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

#290

Post by marssaxman »

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…

Intellectual property law is a net loss to humanity, so by my reckoning, anything which lets us all work around that overhead gets some extra points on the credit side of the ledger.
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