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[HN Gopher] Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that ...
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Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well
Author : 7777777phil
Score : 182 points
Date : 2026-01-13 18:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
web link (garymarcus.substack.com)
w3m dump (garymarcus.substack.com)
| daedrdev wrote:
| This post is literally just 4 screenshots of articles, not even
| its own commentary or discussion.
| laughingcurve wrote:
| Don't be too harsh, it's the most effort Gary has put into his
| criticism in a while </s>
|
| I appreciate good critique but this is not it
| sghiassy wrote:
| LLMs help me read code 10x faster - I'll take the win and say
| thanks
| thechao wrote:
| You're absolutely right!
|
| The irony of a five sentence article making giant claims isn't
| lost on me. Don't get me wrong: I'm amenable to the _idea_ ; but,
| y'know, my kids wrote longer essays in 4th grade.
| emp17344 wrote:
| Guessing this isn't going to be popular here, but he's right. AI
| has some use cases, but isn't the world-changing paradigm shift
| it's marketed as. It's becoming clear the tech is ultimately just
| a tool, not a precursor to AGI.
| teej wrote:
| Is that the claim the OP is making?
| sajithdilshan wrote:
| not YET.
| avaer wrote:
| If AGI is ever going to happen, then it's definitionally a
| precursor to it.
|
| So I'm not really sure how to parse your statement.
| alex_young wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. What if LLMs are helpful but not
| useful to AGI, but some other technology is? Seems likely.
| avaer wrote:
| The comment wasn't referencing LLMs, but generative AI.
|
| Even then, given the deep impact of LLMs and how many
| people are using them already, it's a stretch to say LLMs
| will have no effect on the development of AGI.
|
| I think it's pretty obvious that AGI requires something
| more than LLMs, but I think it's equally obvious LLMs will
| have been involved in its development somewhere, even if
| just a stepping stone. So, a "precursor".
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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!
| merlincorey wrote:
| > 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 hold in the short term.
|
| The long term is a lot harder to predict in any case.
| _vertigo wrote:
| > 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.
| merlincorey wrote:
| "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.
| sswatson wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| Delta leases a big portion of its fleet, which makes your
| example pretty bad.
| simonsmithies wrote:
| Not a terrible example. The planes delta owns are delta's
| assets; the planes the leasing company owns are the
| leasing company's assets. The point is, the code and the
| planes are assets despite the maintenance required to
| keep them in revenue-generating state.
| OneMorePerson wrote:
| It's possible for something to be both an asset and a
| potential liability, it isn't strictly one or the other.
| _heimdall wrote:
| You're hinting at the underlying problem with the quote.
| "Asset" in the quote reads, at least to me, in the
| financial or accounting meaning of the term. "Liability"
| reads, again to me, in the sense of potential risk rather
| than the financial meaning. Its apples and oranges.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| If Delta was going bankrupt it would likely be able to
| sell individual planes for the depreciated book value or
| close to it.
|
| If a software company is going bankrupt, it's very
| unlikely they will be able to sell code for individual
| apps and services they may have written for much at all,
| even if they might be able to sell the whole company for
| something.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| 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.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| 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.
| tengbretson wrote:
| To me, this sounds like:
|
| If AI was good at a certain task then it was a bad task
| in the first place.
|
| Which is just run of the mill dogmatic thinking.
| serf wrote:
| 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 (PRE-AI, PREHISTORIC!) codebases that have
| literally zero AI technical debt associated to them.
|
| I'm not going to bother with the charts & stats, you'll
| just have to trust me and my opinion like humans must do
| in lots of cases. I have lots of sharp knives in my
| kitchen, too -- but I don't want to have to go slice my
| hands on every one to prove to strangers that they are
| indeed sharp -- you'll just have to take my word.
| jbgt wrote:
| 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.
| array_key_first wrote:
| From a developer POV, or at least _my_ developer POV,
| less code is always better. The best code is no code at
| all.
|
| I think getting results can be very easy, at first. But I
| force myself to not just spit out code, because I've been
| burned so, so, so many times by that.
|
| As software grows, the complexity explodes. It's not
| linear like the growth of the software itself, it feels
| exponential. Adding one feature takes 100x the time it
| should because everything is just squished together and
| barely working. Poorly designed systems eventually bring
| velocity to a halt, and you can eventually reach a point
| where even the most trivial of changes are close to
| impossible.
|
| That being said, there is value in throwaway code. After
| all, what is an Excel workbook if not throwaway code? But
| never let the throwaway become a product, or grow too
| big. Otherwise, you become a prisoner. That cheeky little
| Excel workbook can turn into a full-blown backend
| application sitting on a share drive, and it WILL take
| you a decade to migrate off of it.
| mycall wrote:
| You can use AI to simplify software stacks too, only your
| imagination limits you. How do you see things working
| with many less abstraction layers?
|
| I remember coding BASIC with POKE/PEEK assembly inside
| it, same with Turbo Pascal with assembly (C/C++ has
| similar extern abilities). Perhaps you want no more web
| or UI (TUI?). Once you imagine what you are looking for,
| you can label it and go from there.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| yeah AI is perfect at refactor and cleaning things up,
| you just have to instruct it. I've improved my code
| significanlty by asking it to clean up, refactor function
| to pure that I can use & test over a messy application.
| Without creating new bugs.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| You are assuming a lot of things.
|
| The work was moving the many landing pages & content
| elements to NextJS, so we can test, iterate and develop
| faster. While having a more stable system. This was a 10
| year old website, with a very large custom WordPress
| codebase and many plugins.
|
| The content is still in WordPress backend & will be
| migrated in the second phase.
| Zababa wrote:
| >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?
| aprdm wrote:
| lol same. I just wrote a bunch of diagrams with mermaid that
| would legit take me a week, also did a mock of an UI for a
| frontend engineer that would take me another week to do .. or
| some designers. All of that in between meetings...
|
| Waiting for it to actually go well to see what else I can do !
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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, which frankly sounds not all that hard to
| write in code (I've been considering doing this).
|
| Probably the biggest gap would be the ability to ignite,
| drive, and launch new initiatives. How does an AI agent
| "lead" an engineering team? That's not something you can
| code up in an agent runtime. It'd require a whole culture
| change that I have a hard time seeing in reality. But of
| course if there comes a point where AI takes all the junior
| and mid-level coding jobs, then at that point there's no
| culture to change, so staff/principal jobs would be just as
| at risk.
| TACIXAT wrote:
| I have the complete opposite impression w.r.t.
| architecture decisions. The LLMs can cargo cult an
| existing design, but they do not think through design
| consequences well at all. I use them as a rubber duck
| non-stop, but I think I respect less than one out of
| every six of their suggestions.
| daxfohl wrote:
| They've gotten pretty good IME so long as you guide it to
| think out of the box, give it the right level of
| background info, have it provide alternatives instead of
| recommendations, and do your best not to bias it in any
| particular direction.
|
| That said, the thing it really struggles with is when the
| best approach is "do nothing". Which, given that a huge
| chunk of principal level work is in deciding what NOT to
| do, it may be a while before LLMs can viably take that
| role. A principal LLM based on current tech would approve
| every idea that comes across it, and moreover sell each
| of them as "the exact best thing needed by the
| organization right now!"
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Knowing when to nudge it out of a rut (or say skip it) is
| probably the biggest current skill. This is why
| experienced people get generally much better results.
| code_martial wrote:
| I'm not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should
| rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back,
| "what's your problem?" And most of the times it shoots my
| problems down showing exactly why rewriting won't fix
| that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel
| Spolsky once!
|
| Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that's
| different.
| wombat-man wrote:
| I have been able to prototype way faster. I can explain how I
| want a prototype reworked and it's often successful. Doesn't
| always work, but super useful more often than not.
| windowpains wrote:
| That line on the chart labeled "profit" is really going to go
| up now!
| segfaultex wrote:
| Sounds like an argument for better hiring practices and
| planning.
|
| Producing a lot of code isn't proof of anything.
| sheeh wrote:
| Yep. Let's see the projects and more importantly the
| incremental returns...
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > 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.
| hactually wrote:
| I assume this is because they're already insanely profitable
| after hitting PMF and are now trying to bring down infra
| costs?
|
| Right? RIGHT?!
| habinero wrote:
| 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!
| iwontberude wrote:
| Definitely been in that room multiple times.
| sheeh wrote:
| As someone who is more involved in shaping the product
| direction rather than engineering what composes the product
| - I will readily admit many product people are utterly,
| utterly clueless.
|
| Most people have no clue the craftsmanship, work etc it
| takes to create a great product. LLMs are not going to
| change this, in fact they serve as a distraction.
|
| I'm not a SWE so I gain nothing by being bearish on the
| contributions of LLMs to the real economy ;)
| habinero wrote:
| Oh, it wasn't a bash on product people, I'm sorry if it
| came off that way.
|
| It's a reference to a trope where the VP of Eng or CTO
| (who was an engineer decades ago) gets it in their head
| that they want to code again and writes something
| absolute dogshit terrible because their skills have
| degraded. Unfortunately they are your boss's boss's boss
| and can make you deal with it anyways.
|
| I've actually seen it IRL once, to his credit the dude
| finally realized the engineer smiles were pained grimaces
| and it got quietly dropped lol.
| bonesss wrote:
| LLMs do the jobs of developers, thereby eating up countless
| jobs.
|
| LLMs do the jobs of developers without telling semi-
| technical arrogant MBA holders " _no, you're dumb_ ",
| thereby creating all the same jobs as before but also a
| butt-ton more juggling expensive cleanup mixed with ego-
| massaging.
|
| We're talking a 2-10x improvement in 'how hard could it
| be?' iterations. Consultant candy.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| My cofounder is an all the way competent engineer. Making
| this many assumptions would horrify someone halfway competent
| with logic though.
| phito wrote:
| It's crazy how some people here will just make all the
| assumptions possible in order to refuse to believe you.
| Anyone who's used a good model with open code or equivalent
| will know that it's plausible. Refactoring is really cheap
| now when paired with someone competent.
|
| I'm doing the same as your co-founder currently. In a few
| days, I've rewritten old code that took previous employees
| months to do. Their implementation sucked and barely
| worked, the new one is so much better and has tests to
| prove it.
| nsoonhui wrote:
| It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code
| is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the
| requirements along the way. When you have the initial system
| running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all
| the requirements kinks are figured out.
|
| By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at
| all?
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem
| you're trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest
| lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can
| design the system and set precedent however you want. Once
| it's in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of
| your initial decisions, including bad ones.
| touristtam wrote:
| ... And the undocumented code spaghetti that might come
| with a codebase that was touch by numerous hands.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| You can compare it - just factor that in. And compare writing
| it with AI vs. writing it without AI.
|
| We have no clue the scope of the rewrite but for anything
| non-trivial, 2 weeks just isn't going to be possible without
| AI. To the point of you probably not doing it at all.
|
| I have no idea why they are rewriting the code. That's
| another matter.
| bwestergard wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what is your product?
| venndeezl wrote:
| I suspect he means as a trillion dollar corporation led
| endeavor.
|
| I trained a small neural net on pics of a cat I had in the 00s
| (RIP George, you were a good cat).
|
| Mounted a webcam I had gotten for free from somewhere, above
| the cat door, in the exterior of the house.
|
| If the neural net recognized my cat it switched off an
| electromagnetic holding the pet door locked. Worked perfectly
| until I moved out of the rental.
|
| Neural nets are, end of the day, pretty cool. It's the data
| center business that's the problem. Just more landlords,
| wannabe oligarchs, claiming ownership over anything they can
| get the politicians to give them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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 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.
|
| But by the time that plus the demographic collapse shows its
| effects, the people who currently call the shots will be in
| pension, having long since made their money. And my generation
| will be left with collapse everywhere and find ways to somehow
| keep stuff running.
|
| Hell, it's _already_ bad to get qualified human support these
| days. Large corporations effectively rule with impunity, with
| the only recourse consumers have being to either shell out
| immense sums of money for lawyers and court fees or turning to
| consumer protection /regulatory authorities that are being
| gutted as we speak both in money and legal protections, or
| being swamped with AI slop like "legal assistance" AI
| hallucinating case law.
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| > 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/LLMs and the fact that there are no more jobs for
| youngsters. And actually from looking at the purely toxic
| comments on this thread, I would say that's a good thing for
| youngsters to be not be exposed to such "seniors".
|
| Credentialism is dead. "Either ship or shutup" should be the
| mantra of this age.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions
| of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
|
| Why?
|
| Im not even casting shade - I think AI is quite amazing for
| coding and can increase productivity and quality a lot.
|
| But I'm curious why he's doing this.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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 another startup in the
| interim) found himself with a lot of time on his hands
| unexpectedly and thought it would be a neat experiment and
| has been wowed by the results.
|
| Much in the same way people on HN debate when we will have
| self driving cars while millions of people actually have
| their Teslas self-driving every day (it reminds me of when I
| got to bet that Joe Biden would win the election after he
| already did) those who think AI coding is years away are
| missing what's happening now. It's a powerful force magnifier
| in the hands of a skilled programmer and it'll only get
| better.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I agree that code is being written in _exactly_ the same
| sense that Teslas are driving themselves.
| ggfdh wrote:
| Do you have tests at least? Seems reckless to yolo the
| codebase if you don't or can't test easily.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| When I say I want a self driving car I mean one that
| actually drives itself so I don't have to be involved other
| than setting the destination.
|
| What Tesla is selling now is the worst of both worlds. You
| still have to pay attention but it's way more boring so
| it's really hard to do so. Well until it suddenly decides
| to ram a barrier at highway speeds.
|
| Wake me up when I can have a beer and watch a movie while
| it's driving.
| vlod wrote:
| >my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions of salary on
| in the past by himself in a few weeks.
|
| I was expecting a language reference (we all know which one),
| to get more speed, safety and dare I say it "web scale" (insert
| meme). :)
| oenton wrote:
| > and dare I say it "web scale"
|
| Obligatory reference
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| rf15 wrote:
| no need to wait, by using AI you already are mediocre at best
| (because you forego skill and quality for speed)
| thefz wrote:
| > Meanwhile, my cofounder is rewriting code we spent millions
| of salary on in the past by himself in a few weeks.
|
| If the LLM generating the code introduced a bug, who will be
| fixing it? The founder that does not know how to code or the
| LLM that made the mistake first?
| gloosx wrote:
| >rewriting code
|
| Key thing here. The code was already written, so rewriting it
| isn't exactly adding a lot of quantifiable value. If millions
| weren't spent in the first place, there would be no code to
| rewrite.
| mawadev wrote:
| Doesn't this imply that you were not getting the level of
| efficiency out of your investment? It would be a little odd to
| say this publicly as this says more about you and your company.
| The question would be what your code does and if it is
| profitable.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| In this thread: people throwing shade on tech that works,
| comparing it to a perfect world and making weird assumptions
| like no tests, no E2E or manual testing just to make a case.
| Hot take: most SWEs produce shit code, be it by constraints of
| any kind or their own abilities. LLMs do the same but cost less
| and can move faster. If you know how to use it, code will be
| fine. Code is a commodity and a lot of people will be
| blindsided by that in the future. If your value proposition is
| translating requirements into code, I feel sorry for you. The
| output quality of the LLM depends on the abilities of the
| operator. And most SWEs lack the system thinking to be good
| here, in my experience.
|
| As a fractional CTO and in my decade of being co-founder/CTO I
| saw a lot of people and codebases and most of it is just bad.
| You need to compare real life codebases and outputs of
| developers, not what people wished it would be like. And the
| reality is that most of it sucks and most SWEs are bad at their
| jobs.
| sjw987 wrote:
| Good luck with fixing that future mess. This is such an
| incredibly short sighted approach to running a company and
| software dev that I think your cofounder is likely going to
| torpedo your company.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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 with everyone being able to reuse any
| program, without restrictions, but with these AI programming
| tools the rich are now permitted to ignore copyrights, while
| the poor remain constrained by them, as before.
|
| The copyright for programs has caused a huge multiplication of
| the programming effort for many decades, with everyone
| rewriting again and again similar programs, in order for their
| employing company to own the "IP". Now LLMs are exposing what
| would have happened in an alternative timeline.
|
| The LLMs have the additional advantage of fast and easy
| searching through a huge database of programs, but this
| advantage would not have been enough for a significant
| productivity increase over a competent programmer that would
| have searched the same database by traditional means, to find
| reusable code.
| ehnto wrote:
| Howcome you need to re-write millions of dollars in code?
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| G'day Matt from myself another person with a cofounder both
| getting insane value out of AI and astounded at the attitudes
| around HN.
|
| You sound like complete clones of us :-)
|
| We've been at it since July and have built what used to take
| 3-5 people that long.
|
| To the haters: I use TDD and review every line of code, I'm not
| an animal.
|
| There's just 2 of us but some days it feels like we command an
| army.
| smashed wrote:
| Should have used an LLM to proofread.. LLMs can still cannot be
| trusted?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| How dare you accuse Gary-Marcus-5.2-2025-12-11 of being an
| LLM??
| tombert wrote:
| 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_ going
| pretty well, just that we need to work out the kinks. New
| technology is always buggy for awhile, and eventually it becomes
| boring.
| maccard wrote:
| > 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 examples and don't
| hallucinate APIs" here, not deep complicated system design
| topics.
|
| It can one shot a web frontend, just like v0 could in 2023. But
| that's still about all I've seen it work on.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > We're talking "copy basic examples and don't hallucinate
| APIs" here, not deep complicated system design topics.
|
| 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.
|
| The rest of us learn how to be productive with them despite
| these problems.
| drewbug01 wrote:
| > 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 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.
|
| What, precisely, are they good for?
| tombert wrote:
| I think what they're best at right now is the initial
| scaffolding work of projects. A lot of the annoying
| bootstrap shit that I hate doing is actually generally
| handled really well by Codex.
|
| I agree that there's definitely some overhype to them
| right now. At least for the stuff I've done they have
| gotten considerably better though, to a point where the
| code it generates is often usable, if sub-optimal.
|
| For example, about three years ago, I was trying to get
| ChatGPT to write me a C program to do a fairly basic
| ZeroMQ program. It generated something that looked
| correct, but it would crash pretty much immediately,
| because it kept trying to use a pointer after free.
|
| I tried the same thing again with Codex about a week ago,
| and it worked out of the box, and I was even able to get
| it to do more stuff.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| I think it USED to be true that you couldn't really use
| an LLM on a large, existing codebase. Our codebase is
| about 2 million LOC, and a year ago you couldn't use an
| LLM on it for anything but occasional small tasks. Now,
| probably 90% of the code I commit each week was written
| by Claude (and reviewed by me and other humans - and also
| by Copilot and ZeroPath).
| blibble wrote:
| > What, precisely, are they good for?
|
| scamming people
| viking123 wrote:
| Also good for manufacturing consent in Reddit and other
| places. Intelligence services busy with certain country
| now, bots using LLMs to pump out insane amounts of
| content to mold the information atmosphere.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| It seems like just such a weird and rigid way to evaluate
| it? I am a somewhat reasonable human coder, but I can't
| copy and paste a bunch of code without alterations from
| memory either. Can someone still find a use for me?
| falloutx wrote:
| Its strong enough to replace humans at their jobs and
| weak enough that it cant do basic things. Its a paradox.
| Just learn to be productive with them. Pay $200/month and
| work around with its little quirks. /s
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
|
| Programmers have made their career (and possibly life)
| being experts at solving problems that greatly benefit
| from determinism. A problem that doesn't - well either
| that needs to be solved by sophisticated machine
| learning, or by a human. They're trained on essentially
| ignoring those problems - it's not their expertise.
|
| And so they get really thrown off when people use
| computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a
| deterministic problem.
|
| For everyone else, the world, and its solutions, are
| mostly non-deterministic. When they solve a problem, or
| when they pay people to solve a problem, the guarantees
| are much lower. They don't expect perfection every time.
|
| When a normal human asks a programmer to make a change,
| they understand that communication is lossy, and even if
| it isn't, programmers make mistakes.
|
| Using a tool like an LLM is like any other tool. Or like
| asking any other human to do something.
|
| For programmers, it's a cardinal sin if the tool is
| unpredictable. So they dismiss it. For everyone else,
| it's just another tool. They embrace it.
|
| [1] This, of course, is changing as they become better at
| coding.
| maccard wrote:
| I'm perfectly happy for my tooling to not be
| deterministic. I'm not happy for it to make up solutions
| that don't exist, and get stuck in loops because of that.
|
| I use LLMs, I code with a mix of antigravity and Claude
| code depending on the task, but I feel like I'm living in
| a different reality when the code I get out of these
| tools _regularly just doesn't work, at all_. And to the
| parents point, I'm doing something wrong for noticing
| that?
| BeetleB wrote:
| If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right? Isn't
| the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a sign
| that you find them a net positive? Or is it being imposed
| on you?
|
| > And to the parents point, I'm doing something wrong for
| noticing that?
|
| There's nothing wrong pointing out your experience. What
| the OP was implying was he expects them to be able to
| copy/paste reliably almost 100% of the time, and not
| hallucinate. I was merely pointing out that he'll never
| get that with LLMs, and that their inability to do so
| isn't a barrier to getting productive use out of them.
| maccard wrote:
| I was the person who said it can't copy from examples
| without making up APIs but.
|
| > he'll never get that with LLMs, and that their
| inability to do so isn't a barrier to getting productive
| use out of them.
|
| This is _exactly_ what the comment thread we're in said -
| and I agree with him. > 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._
|
| > If it were terrible, you wouldn't use them, right?
| Isn't the fact that you continue to use AI coding tools a
| sign that you find them a net positive? Or is it being
| imposed on you?
|
| You're putting words in my mouth here - I'm not saying
| that they're terrible, I'm saying they're way, way, way
| overhyped, their abilities are overblown, (look at this
| post and the replies of people saying they're writing 90%
| of code with claude and using AI tools to review it), but
| when we challenge that, we're wrong.
| habinero wrote:
| > And so they get really thrown off when people use
| computers in a nondeterministic way to solve a
| deterministic problem
|
| Ah, no. This is wildly off the mark, but I think a lot of
| people don't understand what SWEs actually do.
|
| We don't get paid to write code. We get paid to solve
| problems. We're knowledge workers like lawyers or doctors
| or other engineers, meaning we're the ones making the
| judgement calls and making the technical decisions.
|
| In my current job, I tell my boss what I'm going to be
| working on, not the other way around. That's not always
| true, but it's mostly true for most SWEs.
|
| The flip side of that is I'm also held responsible. If I
| write ass code and deploy it to prod, it's my ass that's
| gonna get paged for it. If I take prod down and cause a
| major incident, the blame comes to me. It's not hard to
| come up with scenarios where your bad choices end up
| costing the company enormous sums of money. Millions of
| dollars for large companies. Fines.
|
| So no, it has nothing to do with non-determinism lol. We
| deal with that all the time. (Machine learning is decades
| old, after all.)
|
| It's evaluating things, weighing the benefits against the
| risks and failure modes, and making a judgement call that
| it's ass.
| tombert wrote:
| Sure, but think about what it's replacing.
|
| If you hired a human, it will cost you thousands a week.
| Humans will also fail at basic tasks, get stuck in useless
| loops, and you still have to pay them for all that time.
|
| For that matter, even if I'm not hiring anyone, _I_ will
| still get stuck on projects and burn through the finite
| number of hours I have on this planet trying to figure stuff
| out and being wrong for a lot of it.
|
| It's not perfect yet, but these coding models, in my mind,
| have gotten pretty good if you're specific about the
| requirements, and even if it misfires fairly often, they can
| still be _useful_ , even if they're not perfect.
|
| I've made this analogy before, but to me they're like really
| eager-to-please interns; not necessarily perfect, and there's
| even a fairly high risk you'll have to redo a lot of their
| work, but they can still be _useful_.
| falloutx wrote:
| I am an AI-skeptic but I would agree this looks impressive
| from certain angles, especially if you're an early startup
| (maybe) or you are very high up the chain and just want to
| focus on cutting costs. On the other hand, if you are about
| to be unemployed, this is less impressive. Can it replace a
| human? I would say no its still long way to go, but a good
| salesman can convince executives that it does and thats all
| that matters.
| tombert wrote:
| I just think Jevins paradox [1]/Gustafson's Law [2] kind
| of applies here.
|
| Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "replaced", as I
| don't really think it's actually going to "replace"
| people long term. I think it's likely to just lead to
| higher output as these get better and better .
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law
| falloutx wrote:
| Not you, but the word replaced is the being used all the
| time. Even senior engineers are saying they are using it
| as a junior engineers while we can easily hire junior
| engineers (but Execs don't want to). Jevon's paradox wont
| work in Software because user's wallets and time is
| limited, and if software becomes too easy to build, it
| becomes harder to sell. Normal people can have 5
| subscriptions, may be 10, but they wont be going to 50 or
| 100. I would say we would have already exhausted users
| already, with all the bad practices.
| xp84 wrote:
| > On the other hand, if you are about to be unemployed,
| this is less impressive
|
| > salesman can convince executives that it does
|
| I tend to think that reality will temper this trend as
| the results develop. Replacing 10 engineers with one
| engineer using Cursor will result in a vast velocity hit.
| Replacing 5 engineers with 5 "agents" assigned to
| autonomously implement features will result in a mess
| eventually. (With current technology -- I have no idea
| what even 2027 AI will do). At that point those
| unemployed engineers will find their phones ringing off
| the hook to come and clean up the mess.
|
| Not that unlike what happens in many situations where
| they fire teams and offshore the whole thing to a team of
| average developers 180 degrees of longitude away who
| don't have any domain knowledge of the business or
| connections to the stakeholders. The pendulum swings back
| in the other direction.
| maccard wrote:
| You've missed my point here - I agree that gen AI has
| changed everything and is useful, _but_ I disagree that
| it's improved substantially - which is what the comment I
| replied to claimed.
|
| Anecdotally I've seen no difference in model changes in the
| last year, but going from LLM to Claude code (where we told
| the LLMs they can use tools on our machines) was a game
| changer. The improvement there was the agent loop and the
| support for tools.
|
| In 2023 I asked v0.dev to one shot me a website for a
| business I was working on and it did it in about 3 minutes.
| I feel like we're still stuck there with the models.
| tombert wrote:
| In my experience it has gotten considerably better. When
| I get it to generate C, it often gets the pointer logic
| correct, which wasn't the case three years ago. Three
| years ago, ChatGPT would struggle with even fairly
| straightforward LaTeX, but now I can pretty easily get it
| to generate pretty elaborate LaTeX and I have even had
| good success generating LuaTeX. I've been able to fairly
| successfully have it generate TLA+ spec from existing
| code now, which didn't work even a year ago when I tried
| it.
|
| Of course, sample size of one, so if you haven't gotten
| those results then fair enough, but I've at least
| observed it getting a lot better.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I've been coding with LLMs for less than a year. As I
| mentioned to someone in email a few days ago: In the
| first half, when an LLM solved a problem differently from
| me, I would probe why and more often than not overrule
| and instruct it to do it my way.
|
| Now it's reversed. More often than not its method is
| better than mine (e.g. leveraging a better
| function/library than I would have).
|
| In general, it's writing idiomatic mode much more often.
| It's been many months since I had to correct it and tell
| it to be idiomatic.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| Ya but what do you do when there are no humans left?
| cudgy wrote:
| Prompt for a human?
| elzbardico wrote:
| There's a subtle point a moment when you HAVE to take the
| driver wheel from the AI. All issues I see are from people
| insisting to use far beyond the point it stops being useful.
|
| It is a helper, a partner, it is still not ready go the last
| mile
| xp84 wrote:
| It's funny how many people don't get that. It's like adding
| a pretty great senior or staff level engineer to sit on-
| call next to every developer and assist them, for basically
| free (I've never used any of the expensive stuff yet. Just
| things like Copilot, Grok Code in JetBrains, just asking
| Gemini to write bits of code for me).
|
| If you hired a staff engineer to sit next to me, and I just
| had him/her write 100% of the code and never tried to
| understand it, that would be an unwise decision on my part
| and I'd have little room to complain about the times he
| made mistakes.
| maccard wrote:
| As someone else said in this thread:
|
| > 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.
|
| I'm perfectly happy to write code, to use these tools. I do
| use them, and sometimes they work (well). Other times they
| have catastrophic failures. But apparently it's my failure
| for not understanding the tool or expecting too much of the
| tool, while others are screaming from the rooftops about
| how this new model changes everything (which happens every
| 3 months at this point)
| elzbardico wrote:
| There's no silver bullet. I'm not a researcher, but I've
| done my best to understand how these systems work--
| through books, video courses, and even taking underpaid
| hourly work at a company that creates datasets for RLHF.
| I spent my days fixing bugs step-by-step, writing notes
| like, "Hmm... this version of the library doesn't support
| protocol Y version 4423123423. We need to update it, then
| refactor the code so we instantiate 'blah' and pass it to
| 'foo' before we can connect."
|
| That experience gave me a deep appreciation for how
| incredible LLMs are and the amazing software they can
| power--but it also completely demystified them. So by all
| means, let's use them. But let's also understand there
| are no miracles here. Go back to Shannon's papers from
| the '60s, and you'll understand that what seems to you
| like "emerging behaviors" are quite explainable from an
| information theory background. Learn how these models are
| built. Keep up with the latests research papers. If you
| do, you'll recognize their limitations before those
| limitations catch you by surprise.
|
| There is no silver bullet. And if you think you've found
| one, you're in for a world of pain. Worse still, you'll
| never realize the full potential of these tools, because
| you won't understand their constraints, their limits, or
| their pitfalls.
| maccard wrote:
| > There is no silver bullet. And if you think you've
| found one, you're in for a world of pain. Worse still,
| you'll never realize the full potential of these tools,
| because you won't understand their constraints, their
| limits, or their pitfalls.
|
| See my previous comment (quoted below).
|
| > 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.
|
| Regarding "there are no miracles here"
|
| Here are a few comments from this thread alone,
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609559 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610260 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609800 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611708
|
| Here's a few from some older threads: -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46519851 -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485304
|
| There is a very vocal group who are telling us that there
| _is_ a silver bullet.
| Aurornis wrote:
| You're doing exactly the thing that the parent commenter
| pointed out: Complaining that they're not perfect yet as if
| that's damning evidence of failure.
|
| We all know LLMs get stuck. We know they hallucinate. We know
| they get things wrong. We know they get stuck in loops.
|
| There are two types of people: The first group learns to work
| within these limits and adapt to using them where they're
| helpful while writing the code when they're not.
|
| The second group gets frustrated every time it doesn't one-
| shot their prompt and declares it all a big farce. Meanwhile
| the rest of us are out here having fun with these tools,
| however limited they are.
| maccard wrote:
| 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 LLMs. They help. But they don't work anywhere near as
| reliably as people talk about them working. And that hasn't
| changed in the 18 months since I first promoted v0 to make
| me a website.
| vips7L wrote:
| Rather be a Luddite than contribute to these soul suckers
| like OpenAI and help them lay off workers.
| Gud wrote:
| How are they "soul suckers"?
|
| Using LLMs has made it fun for me to make software again.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >Every 2/3 months we're hearing there's a new model that just
| blows the last one out of the water for coding
|
| I haven't heard that at all. I hear about models that come
| out and are a bit better. And other people saying they suck.
|
| >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.
|
| Is it bringing you any value? I find it speeds things up a
| LOT.
| user34283 wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that this v0, from 2023,
| achieved comparable results to Gemini 3 in Web design.
|
| Gemini now often produces output that looks significantly
| better than what I could produce manually, and I'm an expert
| for web, although my expertise is more in tooling and package
| management.
| jbs789 wrote:
| Because the likes of Altman have set short term expectations
| unrealistically high.
| tombert wrote:
| I mean that's every tech company.
|
| I made a joke once after the first time I watched one of
| those Apple announcement shows in 2018, where I said "it's
| kind of sad, because there won't be any problems for us to
| solve because the iPhone XS Max is going to solve all of
| them".
|
| The US economy is pretty much a big vibes-based Ponzi scheme
| now, so I don't think we can single-out AI, I think we have
| to blame the fact that the CEOs running these things face no
| negative consequences for lying or embellishing _and_ they do
| get rewarded for it because it will often bump the stock
| price.
|
| Is Tesla _really_ worth more than every other car company
| combined in any kind of objective sense? I don 't think so, I
| think people really like it when Elon lies to them about
| stuff that will come out "next year", and they feel no need
| to punish him economically.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "Ponzi" requires records fraud and is popularly misused,
| sort of like if people started describing every software
| bug as "a stack overflow."
|
| I'd rather characterize it as extremes of Greater Fool
| Theory.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory
| tombert wrote:
| I would argue it's fraud-adjacent. These tech CEOs know
| that they're not going to be able to keep the promises
| that they're making. It's dishonest at the very least, if
| it doesn't legally constitute "fraud".
| hamdingers wrote:
| I maintain that most anti-AI sentiment is actually anti-
| lying-tech-CEO sentiment misattributed.
|
| The technology is neat, the people selling it are ghouls.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Maybe CEOs should face consequences for going on the
| stage and outwardly lying. Instead they're rewarded by a
| bump in stock price because people appear to have
| amnesia.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| 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
| Blockchain. I'm just so sick of hypes.
|
| But I do think it's good tech, just like I enjoy VR daily
| I do have my local LLM servers (I'm pretty anti cloud so
| I avoid it unless I really need the power)
|
| It's not really about the societal impacts for me, at
| least not yet, it's just not good enough for that yet. I
| do worry about that longer-term but not with the current
| generation of AI. At my work we've done extensive
| benchmarking (especially among enthusiastic early
| adopters) and while it can save a couple hours a week
| we're nowhere near the point where it can displace FTEs.
| sroerick wrote:
| This is how I felt about Bitcoin.
| viking123 wrote:
| I hate the Anthropic guy so much.. when I see the face it
| just brings back all the nonsense lies and "predictions" he
| says. Altman is kind of the same but for some reason Dario
| kind of takes the cake.
| barbazoo wrote:
| We implement pretty cool workflows at work using "GenAI" and
| the users of our software are really appreciative. It's like
| saying a hammer sucks because it breaks most things you hit
| with it.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years,
| and it has improved substantially, and is likely to keep
| improving.
|
| I think the big problem is that the pace of improvement was
| UNBELIEVABLE for about 4 years, and it appears to have
| plateaued to almost nothing.
|
| ChatGPT has _barely_ improved in, what, 6 months or so.
|
| They are driving costs down incredibly, which is not nothing.
|
| But, here's the thing, they're not cutting costs because they
| have to. Google has deep enough pockets.
|
| They're cutting costs because - at least with the current known
| paradigm - the cost is not worth it to make material
| improvements.
|
| So unless there's a paradigm shift, we're not seeing MASSIVE
| improvements in output like we did in the previous years.
|
| You could see costs go down to 1/100th over 3 years, seriously.
|
| But they need to make money, so it's possible non of that will
| be passed on.
| sheeh wrote:
| They are focused on reducing costs in order to survive. Pure
| and simple.
|
| Alphabet / Google doesn't have that issue. OAI and other
| money losing firms do.
| tombert wrote:
| 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
| discovery will lead to a lot of really cool new inventions
| and discoveries in a very short period of time, eventually
| people will exhaust the low-to-middle-hanging fruit, and
| progress kind of levels out.
|
| I suspect it will be the same way with AI; I don't now if
| we've reached the top of our current plateau, but if not I
| think we're getting fairly close.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >and is likely to keep improving.
|
| I'm not trying to be pedantic, but how did you arrive at 'keep
| improving' as a conclusion? Nobody is really sure how this
| stuff actually works. That's why AI safety was such a big deal
| a few years ago.
| tombert wrote:
| Totally reasonable question, and I only am making an
| assumption based on observed progress. AI generated code, at
| least in my personal experience, has gotten a lot better, and
| while I don't think that will go to infinity, I do think that
| there's still more room for improvement that could happen.
|
| I will acknowledge that I don't have any evidence of this
| claim, so maybe the word "likely" was unwise, as that
| suggests probability. Feel free to replace "is "likely to"
| with "it feels like it will".
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >Generative AI, as we know it, has only existed ~5-6 years
|
| Probably less than that, practically speaking. ChatGPT's
| initial release date was November 2022. It's closer to 3 years,
| in terms of any significant amount of people using them.
| johnnienaked wrote:
| You're saying the same thing cryptobros say about bitcoin right
| now, and that's 17 years later.
|
| It's a business, but it won't be the thing the first movers
| thought it was.
| tombert wrote:
| It's different in that Bitcoin was never useful in any
| capacity when it was new. AI is at least useful right now and
| it's improved considerably in the last few years.
| robertclaus wrote:
| Odds this was AI generated?
| kingstnap wrote:
| It's literally just four screenshots paired with this sentence.
|
| > Trying to orient our economy and geopolitical policy around
| such shoddy technology -- particularly on the unproven hopes
| that it will dramatically improve- is a mistake.
|
| The screenshots are screenshots of real articles. The sentence
| is shorter than a typical prompt.
| mythrwy wrote:
| It's going well for coding. I just knocked out a mapping project
| that would have been a week+ of work (with docs and stackoverflow
| opened in the background) in a few hours.
|
| And yes, I do understand the code and what is happening and did
| have to make a couple of adjustments manually.
|
| I don't know that reducing coding work justifies the current
| valuations, but I wouldn't say it's "not going all that well".
| dreadsword wrote:
| This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily to
| superficial reader's cognitive biases.
|
| I work commercializing AI in some very specific use cases where
| it extremely valuable. Where people are being lead astray is
| layering generalizations: general use cases (copilots) deployed
| across general populations and generally not doing very well. But
| that's PMF stuff, not a failure of the underlying tech.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This feels like a pretty low effort post that plays heavily
| to superficial reader's cognitive biases.
|
| I haven't followed this author but the few times he's come up
| his writings have been exactly this.
| kokanee wrote:
| I think both sides of this debate are conflating the tech and
| the market. First of all, there were forms of "AI" before
| modern Gen AI (machine learning, NLP, computer vision,
| predictive algorithms, etc) that were and are very valuable for
| specific use cases. Not much has changed there AFAICT, so it's
| fair that the broader conversation about Gen AI is focused on
| general use cases deployed across general populations. After
| all, Microsoft thinks it's a copilot company, so it's fair to
| talk about how copilots are doing.
|
| On the pro-AI side, people are conflating technology success
| with product success. Look at crypto -- the technology supports
| decentralization, anonymity, and use as a currency; but in the
| marketplace it is centralized, subject to KYC, and used for
| speculation instead of transactions. The potential of the tech
| does not always align with the way the world decides to use it.
|
| On the other side of the aisle, people are conflating the
| problematic socio-economics of AI with the state of the
| technology. I think you're correct to call it a failure of PMF,
| and that's a problem worth writing articles about. It just
| shouldn't be so hard to talk about the success of the
| technology and its failure in the marketplace in the same
| breath.
| 1a527dd5 wrote:
| 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 15-30 minutes with some minor
| prompting and hand holding.
|
| I've not yet reached the point where I feel letting is loose and
| do the entire PR for me. But it's getting there.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| I would strongly recommend this podcast episode with Andrej
| Karpathy. I will poorly summarize it by saying his main point
| is that AI will spread like any other technology. It's not
| going to be a sudden flash and everything is done by AI. It
| will be a slow rollout where each year it automates more and
| more manual work, until one day we realize it's everywhere and
| has become indispensable.
|
| It sounds like what you are seeing lines up with his
| predictions. Each model generation is able to take on a little
| more of the responsibilities of a software engineer, but it's
| not as if we suddenly don't need the engineer anymore.
|
| https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy
| sheeh wrote:
| AI first of all is not a technology.
|
| Can people get their words straight before typing?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Is LLM a technology? Are you complaining about the use of
| AI to mean LLM? Because I think that ship has sailed
| daxfohl wrote:
| Though I think it's a very steep sigmoid that we're still far
| on the bottom half of.
|
| For math it just did its first "almost independent" Erdos
| problem. In a couple months it'll probably do another, then
| maybe one each month for a while, then one morning we'll wake
| up and find _whoom_ it solved 20 overnight and is spitting
| them out by the hour.
|
| For software it's been "curiosity ... curiosity ... curiosity
| ... occasionally useful assistant ... slightly more capable
| assistant" up to now, and it'll probably continue like that
| for a while. The inflection point will be when
| OpenAI/Anthropic/Google releases an e2e platform meant to be
| driven primarily by the product team, with engineering just
| being co-drivers. It probably starts out buggy and needing a
| lot of hand-holding (and grumbling) from engineering, but
| slowly but surely becomes more independently capable. Then at
| some point, product will become more confident in that
| platform than their own engineering team, and begin pushing
| out features based on that alone. Once that process starts
| (probably first at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google themselves, but
| spreading like wildfire across the industry), then it's just
| a matter of time until leadership declares that all feature
| development goes through that platform, and retains only as
| many engineers as is required to support the platform itself.
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| And then what? Am I supposed to be excited about this
| future?
| daxfohl wrote:
| Hard to say. In business we'll still have to make hard
| decisions about unique situations, coordinate and align
| across teams and customers, deal with real world
| constraints and complex problems that aren't suitable to
| feed to an LLM and let it decide. In particular, deciding
| whether or not to trust an LLM with a task will itself
| always be a human decision. I think there will always be
| a place for analytical thinking in business even if LLMs
| do most of the actual engineering. If nothing else, the
| speed at which they work will require an increase in
| human analytical effort, to maximize their efficacy while
| maintaining safety and control.
|
| In the academic world, and math in particular, I'm not
| sure. In a way, you could say it doesn't change anything
| because proofs already "exist" long before we discover
| them, so AI just streamlines that discovery. Many
| mathematicians say that asking the right questions is
| more important than finding the answers. In which case,
| maybe math turns into something more akin to philosophy
| or even creative writing, and equivalently follows the
| direction that we set for AI in those fields. Which is,
| perhaps less than one would think: while AI can write a
| novel and it could even be pretty good, part of the value
| of a novel is the implicit bond between the author and
| the audience. "Meaning" has less value coming from a
| machine. And so maybe math continues that way, computers
| solving the problems but humans determining the meaning.
|
| Or maybe it all turns to shit and the sheer ubiquity of
| "masterpieces" of STEM/art everything renders all human
| endeavor pointless. Then the only thing that's left worth
| doing is for the greedy, the narcissists, and the power
| hungry to take the world back to the middle ages where
| knowledge and search for meaning take a back seat to
| tribalism and war mongering until the datacenters power
| needs destroy the planet.
|
| I'm hoping for something more like the former, but, it's
| anybody's guess.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| You have to remember that half these people think they
| are building god.
| user34283 wrote:
| 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.
| sensanaty wrote:
| > 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 they
| control the robots that can do everything Joe could? What
| mechanisms exist for everyone here to prosper, rather
| than a select few who _already_ own more wealth and power
| than the majority of the planet combined?
|
| I think believing in this post-scarcity utopian fairy
| tale is a lot less imaginative and grounded than the
| opposite scenario, one where the common man gets crushed
| ruthlessly.
|
| We don't even have to step into any kind of fantasy world
| to see this is the path we're heading down, in our
| current timeline as we speak, CEOs are foaming at the
| mouth to replace as many people as they can with AI. This
| entire massive AI/LLM bubble we find ourselves in is
| predicated on the idea that companies can finally get rid
| of their biggest cost centers, their human workers and
| their pesky desires like breaks and vacations and
| worker's rights. And yet, there's still somehow people
| out there that will readily lap up the bullshit notion
| that this tech is going to somehow be used as a force of
| good? That I find completely baffling.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > I was a self confessed skeptic.
|
| I think that's the key. Healthy skepticism is always
| appropriate. It's the outright cynicism that gets me. "AI will
| never be able to [...]", when I've been sitting here at work
| doing 2/3rds of those supposedly impossible things. Flawlessly?
| No, of course not! But _I_ don 't do those things flawlessly on
| the first pass, either.
|
| Skepticism is good. I have no time or patience for cynics who
| dismiss the whole technology as impossible.
| sublinear wrote:
| I think the concern expressed as "impossible" is whether it
| _can ever_ do those things "flawlessly" because that's what
| we actually need from its output. Otherwise _a more
| experienced human_ is forced to do double work figuring out
| where it 's wrong and then fixing it.
|
| This is not a lofty goal. It's what we _always expect_ from a
| competent human regardless of the number of passes it takes
| them. This is not what we get from LLMs in the same amount
| time it takes a human to do the work unassisted. If it 's
| impossible then there is no amount of time that would ever
| get this result from this type of AI. This matters because it
| means the human is forced to still be in the loop, not saving
| time, and forced to work harder than just not using it.
|
| I don't mean "flawless" in the sense that there cannot be
| improvements. I mean that the result should be what was
| expected for all possible inputs, and when inspected for bugs
| there are reasonable and subtle technical misunderstandings
| at the root of them (true bugs that are possibly undocumented
| or undefined behavior) and not a mess of additional
| linguistic ones or misuse. This is the stronger definition of
| what people mean by "hallucination", and it is absolutely not
| fixed and there has been no progress made on it either. No
| amount of prompting or prayer can work around it.
|
| This game of AI whack-a-mole really is a waste of time in so
| many cases. I would not bet on statistical models being
| anything more than what they are.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I'm now putting more queries into LLMs than I am into Google
| Search.
|
| I'm not sure how much of that is because Google Search has
| worsened versus LLMs having improved, but it's still a
| substantial shift in my day-to-day life.
|
| Something like finding the most appropriate sensor ICs to use
| for a particular use case requires so much less effort than it
| used to. I might have spent an entire day digging through data
| sheets before, and now I'll find what I need in a few minutes.
| It feels at least as revolutionary as when search replaced
| manually paging through web directories.
| billsunshine wrote:
| a historic moron. Marcus will make Krugman's internet==fax
| machine look like a good prediction
| segfaultex wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put
| out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop.
|
| The same goes for code as well.
|
| I've explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly
| useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local
| models/ tried less interactive "agents"/etc. it's largely all
| slop.
|
| My coworkers who claim they're shipping at warp speed using
| generative AI are almost categorically our worst developers by a
| mile.
| 4782626292283 wrote:
| Ah, Gary Marcus, the 10x ninja whose hand-crafted bespoke code
| singlehandedly keeps his employer in business.
| bawolff wrote:
| Holy moving goal posts batman!
|
| I hate generative AI, but its inarguable what we have now would
| have been considered pure magic 5 years ago.
| meowface wrote:
| How on Earth do people keep taking Gary Marcus seriously?
| throw310822 wrote:
| He's such a joke that even LLMs make fun of him. The Gemini-
| generated Hacker News frontpage for December 9 2035 contains an
| article by Gary Marcus: "AI progress is stalling":
| https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/news
| piskov wrote:
| As if the articles he's linked were written by him
| amw-zero wrote:
| I'm starting to think this take is legitimately insane.
|
| As said in the article, a conservative estimate is that Gen AI
| can currently do 2.5% of all jobs in the entire economy. A
| technology that is really only a couple of years old. This is
| supposed to be _disappointing_? That's millions of jobs _today_,
| in a totally nascent form.
|
| I mean I understand skepticism, I'm not exactly in love with AI
| myself, but the world has literally been transformed.
| Jadiiee wrote:
| It's more about how you use it. It should be a source of inspo.
| Not the end all be all.
| gejose wrote:
| I believe Gary Marcus is quite well known for terrible AI
| predictions. He's not in any way an expert in the field. Some of
| his predictions from 2022 [1]
|
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you
| accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension
| challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters?
| What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.
|
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably
| answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations,
| etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I
| explain in Rebooting AI.
|
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to work as a competent cook in an
| arbitrary kitchen (extending Steve Wozniak's cup of coffee
| benchmark).
|
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free
| code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language
| specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing
| together code from existing libraries doesn't count.]
|
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to take arbitrary proofs from the
| mathematical literature written in natural language and convert
| them into a symbolic form suitable for symbolic verification.
|
| Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early
| 2026.
|
| [1]https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-
| fi...
| ls612 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it can do all of those except for the one which
| requires a physical body (in the kitchen) and the one that
| humans can't do reliably either (construct 10000 loc bug-free).
| merlincorey wrote:
| Which ones are you claiming have already been achieved?
|
| My understanding of the current scorecard is that he's still
| technically correct, though I agree with you there is velocity
| heading towards some of these things being proven wrong by
| 2029.
|
| For example, in the recent thread about LLMs and solving an
| Erdos problem I remember reading in the comments that it was
| confirmed there were multiple LLMs involved as well as an
| expert mathematician who was deciding what context to shuttle
| between them and helping formulate things.
|
| Similarly, I've not yet heard of any non-expert Software
| Engineers creating 10,000+ lines of non-glue code that is bug-
| free. Even expert Engineers at Cloud Flare failed to create a
| bug-free OAuth library with Claude at the helm because some
| things are just extremely difficult to create without bugs even
| with experts in the loop.
| stingrae wrote:
| 1 and 2 have been achieved.
|
| 4 is close, the interface needs some work to allow
| nontechnical people use it. (claude code)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I strongly disagree. I've yet to find an AI that can
| reliably summarise emails, let alone understand nuance or
| sarcasm. And I just asked ChatGPT 5.2 to describe an
| Instagram image. It didn't even get the easily OCR-able
| text correct. Plus it completely failed to mention anything
| sports or stadium related. But it was looking at a cliche
| baseball photo taken by an fan inside the stadium.
| protocolture wrote:
| I have had ChatGPT read text in an image, give me a 100%
| accurate result, and then claim not to have the ability
| and to have guessed the previous result when I ask it to
| do it again.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >let alone understand nuance or sarcasm
|
| I'm still trying to find humans that do this reliably
| too.
|
| To add on, 5.2 seems to be kind of lazy when reading text
| in images by default. Feeding it an image it may give the
| first word or so. But coming back with a prompt 'read all
| the text in the image' makes it do a better job.
|
| With one in particular that I tested I thought it was
| hallucinating some of the words, but there was a picture
| in the picture with small words it saw I missed the first
| time.
|
| I think a lot of AI capabilities are kind of munged to
| end users because they limit how much GPU is used.
| falloutx wrote:
| I dispute 1 & 2 more than 4.
|
| 1) Is it actually watching a movie frame by frame or just
| searching about it and then giving you the answer?
|
| 2) Again can it handle very long novels, context windows
| are limited and it can easily miss something. Where is the
| proof for this?
|
| 4 is probably solved
|
| 4) This is more on predictor because this is easy to game.
| you can create some gibberish code with LLM today that is
| 10k lines long without issues. Even a non-technical user
| can do
| CjHuber wrote:
| I think all of those are terrible indicators, 1 and 2 for
| example only measure how well LLMs can handle long
| context sizes.
|
| If a movie or novel is famous the training data is
| already full of commentary and interpretations of them.
|
| If its something not in the training data, well I don't
| know many movies or books that use only motives that no
| other piece of content before them used, so interpreting
| based on what is similar in the training data still
| produces good results.
|
| EDIT: With 1 I meant using a transcript of the Audio
| Description of the movie. If he really meant watch a
| movie I'd say thats even sillier because well of course
| we could get another Agent to first generate the Audio
| Description, which definitely is possible currently.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Just yesterday I saw an article about a police station's
| AI body cam summarizer mistakenly claim that a police
| officer turned into a frog during a call. What actually
| happened was that the cartoon "princess and the frog" was
| playing in the background.
|
| Sure, another model might have gotten it right, but I
| think the prediction was made less in the sense of "this
| will happen at least once" and more of "this will not be
| an uncommon capability".
|
| When the quality is this low (or variable depending on
| model) I'm not too sure I'd qualify it as a larger issue
| than mere context size.
| CjHuber wrote:
| My point was not that those video to text models are good
| like they are used for example in that case, but more
| generally I was referring to that list of indicators.
| Like surely when analysing a movie it is alright if some
| things are misunderstood by it, especially as the amount
| of misunderstanding can be decreased a lot. That AI body
| camera surely is optimized on speed and inference cost.
| but if you give an agent 10 1s images along with the
| transcript of that period and the full prior transcript,
| and give it reasoning capabilities, it would take almost
| endlessy for that movie to process but the result surely
| will be much better than the body cameras. After all the
| indicator talks about "AI" in general so judge a model
| not optimized for capability but something else to
| measure on that indicator
| bspammer wrote:
| The bug-free code one feels unfalsifiable to me. How do you
| prove that 10,000 lines of code is bug-free, and then there's
| a million caveats about what a bug actually is and how we
| define one.
|
| The second claim about novels seems obviously achieved to me.
| I just pasted a random obscure novel from project gutenberg
| into a file and asked claude questions about the characters,
| and then asked about the motivations of a random side-
| character. It gave a good answer, I'd recommend trying it
| yourself.
| verse wrote:
| I agree with you but I'd point out that unless you've read
| the book it's difficult to know if the answer you got was
| accurate or it just kinda made it up. In my experience it
| makes stuff up.
|
| Like, it behaves as if any answer is better than no answer.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| So do humans asked to answer tests. The appropriate thing
| is to compare to human performance at the same task.
|
| At most of these comprehension tasks, AI is already
| superhuman (in part because Gary picked scaled tasks that
| humans are surprisingly bad at).
| rafaelmn wrote:
| You can't really compare to human performance because the
| failure modes and performance characteristics are so
| different.
|
| In some instances you'll get results that are shockingly
| good (and in no time), in others you'll have a grueling
| experience going in circles over fundamental reasoning,
| where you'd probably fire any person on the spot for
| having that kind of a discussion chain.
|
| And there's no learning between sessions or subject area
| mastery - results on the same topic can vary within same
| session (with relevant context included).
|
| So if something is superhuman and subhuman a large
| percentage of time but there's no good way of telling
| which you'll get or how - the result isn't the average if
| you're trying to use the tool.
| retrac wrote:
| I've done similar loose experiments using a 19th century
| French novel I have read (L'Agonie by Jean Lombard), and
| which is quite obscure. There is no English translation of
| the novel published.
|
| Using Gemini Notebooks I've found it passable at
| summarizing chapters, listing characters, major theme and
| so on, and it can do this in English.
|
| "What is the symbolism of the Black Stone?"
|
| > In the sources, the Black Stone (referred to as the
| Pierre-Noire) serves as the central religious icon of the
| Syrian Sun cult brought to Rome by the Emperor Elagabalus.
| Its symbolism is multifaceted, ranging from fertility and
| virility to a mystical pursuit of universal unity.
|
| > It represents the perennity of the Sun, which fertilizes
| the world, causing "germs to rise" and spreading them
| through the atmosphere. It is viewed as the "definitive
| form" of divinity, intended to absorb and replace the
| "transitory forms" of all other Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and
| Persian gods, including the Christian "Kreistos". >
| Virility and Phallic Symbolism > > The sources explicitly
| characterize the Black Stone as a gigantic sacred phallus.
| It is described as: * An icon of virility and the "organ of
| generation" * A "unisexual icon" that materializes the
| generative force of nature * A representation of "virility
| in activity," which is why it is often paraded and elevated
| in an "orgasmic" or "colossal adoration"
|
| > The Androgyne and Universal Unity - Beyond simple
| fertility, the philosopher Atillius explains a more
| complex, "mad" metaphysical project associated with the
| stone. It symbolizes "Life One" (Vie Une) and the return to
| a unisexual state of perfection. * The Androgyne: Atillius
| believes that by pursuing "the male sex by the male sex,"
| the cult "inutilizes" the female sex to eventually create
| the Androgyne--a self-sufficient being containing both
| sexes * Unity: The stone signifies the fusion of all
| generative forces into a single Unity, reversing the
| "separation of the sexes" which is viewed as a state of
| unhappiness and impotence. * Marriage of Moon and Sun: The
| ritual marriage of the goddess Astaroth (representing the
| Moon and the female principle) to the Black Stone
| (representing the Sun and the male principle) symbolizes
| the merging of the Orient and Occident into this unified
| life principle > > Destruction of the Symbol - The Black
| Stone ultimately becomes a symbol of Oriental pollution and
| decadence to the Roman populace. During the final rebellion
| against Elagabalus, the stone is torn from its temple on
| the Palatine, defiled with filth, and broken into pieces to
| ensure that its "signification of Life" would never again
| dominate Rome.
|
| This is all accurate to the book, even teasing out a couple
| themes that were only subconsciously present to me.
|
| The NotebookLM version gives citations with links to the
| original text to support all these assertions, which
| largely are coherent with that purpose.
|
| The input is raw images of a book scan! Imperfect as it is
| it still blows my mind. Not that long ago any kind of
| semantic search or analysis was a very hard AI problem.
| daveguy wrote:
| "quite obscure" doesn't mean there is nothing in the
| internet that directly addresses the question.
|
| Here is an english analysis of the text that easily
| showed up in an internet search:
|
| https://www.cantab.net/users/leonardo/Downloads/Varian%20
| Sym...
|
| This source includes analysis of "the Black Stone."
| retrac wrote:
| Not quite the same analysis. The human is better, no
| surprise. But the NotebookLM output links back to the
| original book in a very useful way. If you think about it
| as fuzzy semantic search it's amazing. If you want an
| essay or even just creativity, yes it's lacking.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Surely there is analysis available online in French
| though?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably
| answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations,
| etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I
| explain in Rebooting AI.
|
| Can AI actually do this? This looks like a nice benchmark for
| complex language processing, since a complete novel takes up a
| whole lot of context (consider _War and Peace_ or _The Count of
| Monte Cristo_ ). Of course the movie variety is even more
| challenging since it involves especially complex multi-modal
| input. You could easily extend it to making sense of a whole TV
| series.
| the-grump wrote:
| Yes they can. The size of many codebases is much larger and
| LLMs can handle those.
|
| Consider also that they can generate summaries and tackle the
| novel piecemeal, just like a human would.
|
| Re: movies. Get YouTube premium and ask YouTube to summarize
| a 2hr video for you.
| falloutx wrote:
| Novel is different from a codebase. In code you can have a
| relationship between files and most files can be ignored
| depending on what you're doing. But for a novel, its a
| sequential thing, in most cases A leads to B and B leads to
| C and so on.
|
| > Re: movies. Get YouTube premium and ask YouTube to
| summarize a 2hr video for you.
|
| This is different from watching a movie. Can it tell what
| suit actor was wearing? Can it tell what the actor's face
| looked like? Summarising and watching are too different
| things.
| cmcaleer wrote:
| You're moving the goalposts. Gary Marcus' proposal was
| being able to ask: Who are the characters? What are their
| conflicts and motivations? etc.
|
| Which is a relatively trivial task for a current LLM.
| daveguy wrote:
| The Gary Marcus proposal you refer to was about a novel,
| and not a codebase. I think GP's point is that
| motivations require analysis outside of the given (or
| derived) context window, which LLMs are essentially
| incapable of doing.
| pigpop wrote:
| Yes, it is possible to do those things and there are
| benchmarks for testing multimodal models on their ability
| to do so. Context length is the major limitation but
| longer videos can be processed in small chunks whose
| descriptions can be composed into larger scenes.
|
| https://github.com/JUNJIE99/MLVU
|
| https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenGVLab/MVBench
|
| Ovis and Qwen3-VL are examples of models that can work
| with multiple frames from a video at once to produce both
| visual and temporal understanding
|
| https://huggingface.co/AIDC-AI/Ovis2.5-9B
|
| https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-VL
| idreyn wrote:
| 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.
| alextingle wrote:
| How do you get a novel sized file into Claude? I've tried,
| and it always complains it's too long.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >Can AI actually do this? This looks like a nice benchmark
| for complex language processing, since a complete novel takes
| up a whole lot of context (consider War and Peace or The
| Count of Monte Cristo)
|
| Yes, you just break the book down by chapters or whatever
| conveniently fits in the context window to produce summaries
| such that all of the chapter summaries can fit in one context
| window.
|
| You could also do something with a multi-pass strategy where
| you come up with a collection of ideas on the first pass and
| then look back with search to refine and prove/disprove them.
|
| Of course for novels which existed before the time of
| training an LLM will already contain trained information
| about so having it "read" classic works like _The Count of
| Monte Cristo_ and answer questions about it would be a bit of
| an unfair pass of the test because models will be expected to
| have been trained on large volumes of existing text analysis
| on that book.
|
| >reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts,
| motivations
|
| LLMs can already do this automatically with my code in a
| sizable project (you know what I mean), it seems pretty
| simple to get them to do it with a book.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Yes, you just break the book down by chapters or whatever
| conveniently fits in the context window to produce
| summaries such that all of the chapter summaries can fit in
| one context window.
|
| I've done that a few month ago and in fact doing just this
| will miss cross-chapter informations (say something is said
| in chapter 1, that doesn't appears to be important but
| reveals itself crucial later on, like "Chekhov's gun").
|
| Maybe doing that iteratively several time would solve the
| problem, I run out of time and didn't try but the
| straightforward workflow you're describing doesn't work so
| I think it's fair to say this challenge isn't solve. (It
| works better with non-fiction though, because the prose is
| usually drier and straight to the point).
| blharr wrote:
| in that case, why not summarize the previous chapters and
| then include that as context to the next chapter?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| No human reads a novel and evaluates it as a whole. It's a
| story and the readers perception changes over the course of
| reading the book. Current AI can certainly do that.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| > It's a story and the readers perception changes over the
| course of reading the book.
|
| You're referring to casual reading, but writers and people
| who have an interest and motivation to read deeply review,
| analyze, and summarize books under lenses and reflect on
| them; for technique as much as themes, messages, how well
| they capture a milieu, etc. So that's quite a bit more than
| "no human"!
| colechristensen wrote:
| Besides being a cook which is more of a robotics problem all of
| the rest are accomplished to the point of being arguable about
| how reliably LLMs can perform these tasks, the arguments being
| between the enthusiast and naysayer camps.
|
| The keyword being "reliably" and what your threshold is for
| that. And what "bug free" means. Groups of expert humans
| struggle to write 10k lines of "bug free" code in the
| absolutist sense of perfection, even code with formal proofs
| can have "bugs" if you consider the specification not matching
| the actual needs of reality.
|
| All but the robotics one are demonstrable in 2026 at least.
| thethirdone wrote:
| Which ones of those have been achieved in your opinion?
|
| I think the arbitrary proofs from mathematical literature is
| probably the most solved one. Research into IMO problems, and
| Lean formalization work have been pretty successful.
|
| Then, probably reading a novel and answering questions is the
| next most successful.
|
| Reliably constructing 10k bug free lines is probably the least
| successful. AI tends to produce more bugs than human
| programmers and I have yet to meet a programmer who can
| _reliably_ produce less than 1 bug per 10k lines.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Formalizing an _arbitrary_ proof is incredibly hard. For one
| thing, you need to make sure that you 've got at least a
| correct formal statement for all the prereqs you're relying
| on, or the whole thing becomes pointless. Many areas of math
| ouside of the very "cleanest" fields (meaning e.g. algebra,
| logic, combinatorics etc.) have not seen much success in
| formalizing existing theory developments.
| kleene_op wrote:
| > Reliably constructing 10k bug free lines is probably the
| least successful.
|
| You imperatively need to try Claude Code, because it
| absolutely does that.
| thethirdone wrote:
| I have seen many people try to use Claude Code and get LOTS
| of bugs. Show me any > 10k project you have made with it
| and I will put the effort in to find one bug free of
| charge.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| This comment or something very close always appears alongside a
| Gary Marcus post.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Which is fortunate, considering how asinine it is in 2026 to
| expect that none of the items listed will be accomplished in
| the next 3.9 years.
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| I think it's for good reason. I'm a bit at a loss as to why
| every time this guy rages into the ether of his blog it's
| considered newsworthy. Celebrity driven tech news is just so
| tiresome. Marcus was surpassed by others in the field and now
| he's basically a professional heckler on a university
| payroll. I wish people could just be happy for the success of
| others instead of fuming about how so and so is a billionaire
| and they are not.
| raincole wrote:
| 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).
| raincole wrote:
| > Many of these have already been achieved, and it's only early
| 2026.
|
| I'm quite sure people who made those (now laughable)
| predictions will tell you none of these has been achieved,
| because AI isn't doing this "reliably" or "bug-free."
|
| Defending your predictions is like running an insurance
| company. You always win.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| In my opinion, contrary to other comments here I think AI can
| do all of the above already except being a kitchen cook.
|
| Just earlier today I asked it to give me a summary of a show I
| was watching until a particular episode in a particular season
| without spoiling the rest of it and it did a great job.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| You know that almost every show as summaries of episodes
| available online?
| herunan wrote:
| First of all, popping in a few screenshots of articles and papers
| is not proper analysis.
|
| Second of all, GenAI is going well or not depending on how we
| frame it.
|
| In terms of saving time, money and effort when coding, writing,
| analysing, researching, etc. It's extremely successful.
|
| In terms of leading us to AGI... GenAI alone won't reach that.
| Current ROI is plateauing, and we need to start investing more
| somewhere else.
| rpowers wrote:
| 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.
| afspear wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm over here reducing my ADO ticket time estimates by
| 75%.
| saberience wrote:
| Gary Marcus (probably): "Hey this LLM isn't smarter than Einstein
| yet, it's not going all that well"
|
| The goalposts keep getting pushed further and further every
| month. How many math and coding Olympiads and other benchmarks
| will LLMs need to dominate before people will actually admit that
| in some domains it's really quite good.
|
| Sure, if you're a Nobel prize winner or PhD then LLMs aren't as
| good as you yet, but for 99% of the people in the world, LLMs are
| better than you at Math, Science, Coding, and every language
| probably except your native language, and it's probably better at
| you at that too...
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| > LLMs can still cannot be trusted
|
| But can they write grammatically correct statements?
| efilife wrote:
| This was the first thing I noticed too. This is the most low
| effort post I have ever seen that high up on hacker news
| m463 wrote:
| 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"
| anarticle wrote:
| 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 are cheap and data is expensive.)
| didibus wrote:
| Ignoring the actual poor quality of this write-up, I think we
| don't know how well GenAI is going to be honest. I feel we've not
| been able to properly measure or assess it's actual impact yet.
|
| Even as I use it, and I use it everyday, I can't really assess
| its true impact. Am I more productive or less overall? I'm not
| too sure. Do I do higher quality work or lower quality work
| overall? I'm not too sure.
|
| All I know, it's pretty cool, and using it is super easy. I
| probably use it too much, in a way, that it actually slows things
| down sometimes, when I use it for trivial things for example.
|
| At least when it comes to productivity/quality I feel we don't
| really know yet.
|
| But there are definite cool use-cases for it, I mean, I can edit
| photos/videos in ways I simply could not before, or generate a
| logo for a birthday party, I couldn't do that before. I can make
| a tune that I like, even if it's not the best song in the world,
| but it can have the lyrics I want. I can have it extract whatever
| from a PDF. I can have it tell me what to watch out for in a
| gigantic lease agreement I would not have bothered reading
| otherwise.
|
| I can have it fix my tests, or write my tests, not sure if it
| saves me time, but I hate doing that, so it definitely makes it
| more fun and I can kind of just watch videos at the same time,
| what I couldn't before. Coding quality of life improvements are
| there too, I want to generate a sample JSON out of a JSONSchema,
| and so on. If I want, I can write the a method using English
| prompts instead of the code itself, might not truly be faster or
| not, not sure, but sometimes it's less mentally taxing, depending
| on my mood, it can be more fun or less fun, etc.
|
| All those are pretty awesome wins and a sign that for sure those
| things will remain and I will happily pay for them. So maybe it
| depends on what you expected.
| sheeh wrote:
| And what do you think investors in OAI et al are expecting?
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| Haters gonna hate.
| jaffee wrote:
| 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'll just be over here building my AI based business
| with AI and solving real problems in the very real manufacturing
| sector.
| blindriver wrote:
| This entire take is nonsense.
|
| I just used ChatGPT to diagnose a very serious but ultimately
| not-dangerous health situation last week and it was perfect. It
| literally guided me perfectly without making me panic and helped
| me understand what was going on.
|
| We use ChatGPT at work to do things that we have literally laid
| people off for, because we don't need them anymore. This included
| fixing bugs at a level that is at least E5/senior software
| engineer. Sometimes it does something really bad but it
| definitely saves times and helps avoid adding headcount.
|
| Generative AI is years beyond what I would have expected even 1
| year ago. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about, he's
| just picking and choosing one-off articles that make it seem like
| it's supporting his points.
| unwise-exe wrote:
| Meanwhile $employer is continuing to migrate individual tasks to
| in-house AI tooling, and has licensed an off-the-shelf coding
| agent for all of us developers to put in our IDEs.
| siscia wrote:
| I think that the wider industry is living right now what was
| coding and software engineering around 1 year or so ago.
|
| Yeah you could ask ChatGPT or Claude to write code, but it wasn't
| really there.
|
| It needs a while to adopt the model AND the UI. As in software
| are the first one because we are both makers and users.
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Seems like black and white thinking to me. I had it make
| suggestions for 10 triage issues for my team today and agreed
| with all of its routings. That's certainly better than 6 months
| ago.
| sublinear wrote:
| All this AI discussion has done is reveal how naive some people
| are.
|
| You're not losing your job unless you work on trivial codebases.
| There's a very clear pattern what those are: startups,
| greenfield, games, junk apps, mindless busywork that probably has
| an existing better tool on github, etc. Basically anything that
| doesn't have any concrete business requirements or legal
| liability.
|
| This isn't to say those codebases will always be trivial, but
| good luck cleaning that up or facing the reality of having to
| rewrite it properly. At least you have AI to help with
| boilerplate. Maybe you'll learn to read docs along the way.
|
| The people claiming to be significantly more productive are
| either novice programmers or optimistic for unexplained reasons
| they're still trying to figure out. When they want to let us
| know, most people still won't care because it's not even the good
| kind of unreasonable that brings innovation.
|
| The only real value in modern LLMs is that natural language
| processing is a lot better than it used to be.
|
| Are we done now?
| fortyseven wrote:
| I've just started ignoring people like this. You think
| everything's going bad? Okay fine. You go ahead and keep
| believing that. Maybe you could get it printed on a sandwich
| board and walk up and down the street with it.
| moonshotideas wrote:
| 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 the war
| that's been over for 10 years - hopefully they can rejoin
| society, merge back with reality and get on with their lives
| dkobia wrote:
| Preaching to the wrong choir. The HN community is reaping massive
| benefits from generative AI.
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