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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

#311

Post by foobarchu »

sswatson wrote: post #176
merlincorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It’s well known and also wrong. Delta’s airplanes also require a great deal of maintenance, and I’m sure they strive to have no more than are necessary for their objectives. But if you talk to one of Delta’s accountants, they will be happy to disabuse you of the notion that the planes are entered in the books as a liability.

If we're bringing in other industries, you'd be wise to consider banking. Savings accounts are something most people would consider an asset, because it's money the bank has on hand and can use for loan purposes.

But it's the opposite, deposits are liabilities because they need interest paid out and can be withdrawn at any time.

Just because the company has a thing that could be assigned value doesn't make it automatically an asset.

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

#312

Post by joquarky »

sjw987 wrote: post #239
pj4533 wrote: post #237

All I know is that I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have. How do you quantify for the skeptics the mental shift that happens when you know you can just build stuff now? COULD I do this stuff before? Sure. But I wouldn’t have. Life gets in the way. Now, the bar is low so why not build stuff? Some of it ships, some of it is just experimentation. It’s all building. Trying to quantify that shift is imp…

"I have built more in the past 10 months than I ever have." Correction. The genAI has built it. I haven't got any skin on either side here, but doesn't the fact the genAI can build it imply that what you are doing is heavily trodden ground, that there will be less and less need for developers like you, and will gradually lead to many developers (like you) being cut out of the market entirely. For personal stuff it's…

> For work, it seems like a double edged sword that will eventually cut the devs

Developers have been putting non-developers out of a job for decades.

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

#313

Post by joquarky »

m463 wrote: post #102

I see stuff like this and think of these two things: 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle or 2) "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." or maybe originally: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you"

> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

The only people who use this quote sincerely have been crackpots, in my experience.

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

#314

Post by joquarky »

moonshotideas wrote: post #211

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…

I think the "AI isn't doing anything" crowd have some kind of vocabulary/language barriers/deficiencies that prevent them from refining their prompting methods into something that works for them.

I find that the more precise I am in my prompts, the more precise the response. But that requires that I use vocabulary that I wouldn't use in a human conversation.

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

#315

Post by joquarky »

jaffee wrote: post #132

What a joke this guy is. I can sit down and crank out a real, complex feature in a couple hours that would have previously taken days and ship it to the users of our AI platform who can then respond to RFQs in minutes where they would have previously spent hours matching descriptions to part numbers manually. ...and yet we still see these articles claiming LLMs are dying/overhyped/major issues/whatever. Cool man, I'l…

I'm in a similar situation.

Sometimes, I suspect that half the naysayers are just trolling for workable ideas; i.e., they want proof of someone's success so they can copy it.

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

#316

Post by joquarky »

anarticle wrote: post #112

Download models you can find now and forever. The guardrails will only get worse, or models banned entirely. Whether it's because of "hurts people's health" or some other moral panic, it will kill this tech off. gpt-oss isn't bad, but even models you cannot run are worth getting since you may be able to run them in the future. I'm hedging against models being so nerfed they are useless. (This is unlikely, but drives…

Guardrails are just adjustable parameters. The trick is finding the right ones and turning them off.

I forget the name, but there is at least one project dedicated to this.

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

#317

Post by thehappypm »

Zababa wrote: post #216
merlincorey wrote: post #25

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. 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?

A more accurate description of code is that it’s a depreciating asset, perhaps, or an asset that requires maintenance cost. Neither of which is a liability

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

#318

Post by colechristensen »

littlestymaar wrote: post #284
colechristensen wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Models can do this all by themselves after a single human interaction, I think that fits

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

#319

Post by tom_m »

_vertigo wrote: post #31
merlincorey wrote: post #25

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. 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, 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.

Not a very valuable one. Never had been. That's the funny part. So many people want software but then don't know what to do once they have it.

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

#320

Post by tom_m »

It's going well in terms of being a valuable tool. It's not going well from an economic point of view. There's going to be winners and losers in this bubble. Things will settle and it will be commonplace technology in the future. Not going anywhere. It's just over hyped right now.

Then you consider the massive spend in data centers, the ram shortage, etc. The writing is on the wall.

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