Skip to content

AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study

Technology
277 108 90
  • This post did not contain any content.

    Hey I went there

  • people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence.

    You've bought-in to the hype. I won't try to argue with you because you aren't cognizent of reality.

    You're projecting. Every accusation is a confession.

  • Have you tried insulting the AI in the system prompt (as well as other tunes to the system prompt)?

    I'm not joking, it really works

    For example:

    Instead of "You are an intelligent coding assistant..."

    "You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code..."

    “You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code…”

    Honestly, that's what you have to do. It's the only way I can get through using Claude.ai. I treat it like it's an absolute moron, I insult it, I "yell" at it, I threaten it and guess what? the solutions have gotten better. not great but a hell of a lot better than what they used to be. It really works. it forces it to really think through the problem, research solutions, cite sources, etc. I have even told it i'll cancel my subscription to it if it gets it wrong.

    no more "do this and this and then this but do this first and then do this" after calling it a "fucking moron" and what have you it will provide an answer and just say "done."

  • “You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code…”

    Honestly, that's what you have to do. It's the only way I can get through using Claude.ai. I treat it like it's an absolute moron, I insult it, I "yell" at it, I threaten it and guess what? the solutions have gotten better. not great but a hell of a lot better than what they used to be. It really works. it forces it to really think through the problem, research solutions, cite sources, etc. I have even told it i'll cancel my subscription to it if it gets it wrong.

    no more "do this and this and then this but do this first and then do this" after calling it a "fucking moron" and what have you it will provide an answer and just say "done."

    This guy is the moral lesson at the start of the apocalypse movie

  • This post did not contain any content.

    This is the same kind of short-sighted dismissal I see a lot in the religion vs science argument. When they hinge their pro-religion stance on the things science can’t explain, they’re defending an ever diminishing territory as science grows to explain more things. It’s a stupid strategy with an expiration date on your position.

    All of the anti-AI positions, that hinge on the low quality or reliability of the output, are defending an increasingly diminished stance as the AI’s are further refined. And I simply don’t believe that the majority of the people making this argument actually care about the quality of the output. Even when it gets to the point of producing better output than humans across the board, these folks are still going to oppose it regardless. Why not just openly oppose it in general, instead of pinning your position to an argument that grows increasingly irrelevant by the day?

    DeepSeek exposed the same issue with the anti-AI people dedicated to the environmental argument. We were shown proof that there’s significant progress in the development of efficient models, and it still didn’t change any of their minds. Because most of them don’t actually care about the environmental impacts. It’s just an anti-AI talking point that resonated with them.

    The more baseless these anti-AI stances get, the more it seems to me that it’s a lot of people afraid of change and afraid of the fundamental economic shifts this will require, but they’re embarrassed or unable to articulate that stance. And it doesn’t help that the luddites haven’t been able to predict a single development. Just constantly flailing to craft a new argument to criticize the current models and tech. People are learning not to take these folks seriously.

  • Have you tried insulting the AI in the system prompt (as well as other tunes to the system prompt)?

    I'm not joking, it really works

    For example:

    Instead of "You are an intelligent coding assistant..."

    "You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code..."

    I frequently find myself prompting it: "now show me the whole program with all the errors corrected." Sometimes I have to ask that two or three times, different ways, before it coughs up the next iteration ready to copy-paste-test. Most times when it gives errors I'll just write "address: " and copy-paste the error message in - frequently the text of the AI response will apologize, less frequently it will actually fix the error.

  • This guy is the moral lesson at the start of the apocalypse movie

    He's developing a toxic relationship with his AI agent. I don't think it's the best way to get what you want (demonstrating how to be abusive to the AI), but maybe it's the only method he is capable of getting results with.

  • This is the same kind of short-sighted dismissal I see a lot in the religion vs science argument. When they hinge their pro-religion stance on the things science can’t explain, they’re defending an ever diminishing territory as science grows to explain more things. It’s a stupid strategy with an expiration date on your position.

    All of the anti-AI positions, that hinge on the low quality or reliability of the output, are defending an increasingly diminished stance as the AI’s are further refined. And I simply don’t believe that the majority of the people making this argument actually care about the quality of the output. Even when it gets to the point of producing better output than humans across the board, these folks are still going to oppose it regardless. Why not just openly oppose it in general, instead of pinning your position to an argument that grows increasingly irrelevant by the day?

    DeepSeek exposed the same issue with the anti-AI people dedicated to the environmental argument. We were shown proof that there’s significant progress in the development of efficient models, and it still didn’t change any of their minds. Because most of them don’t actually care about the environmental impacts. It’s just an anti-AI talking point that resonated with them.

    The more baseless these anti-AI stances get, the more it seems to me that it’s a lot of people afraid of change and afraid of the fundamental economic shifts this will require, but they’re embarrassed or unable to articulate that stance. And it doesn’t help that the luddites haven’t been able to predict a single development. Just constantly flailing to craft a new argument to criticize the current models and tech. People are learning not to take these folks seriously.

    Maybe the marketers should be a bit more picky about what they slap "AI" on and maybe decision makers should be a little less eager to follow whatever Better Auto complete spits out, but maybe that's just me and we really should be pretending that all these algorithms really have made humans obsolete and generating convincing language is better than correspondence with reality.

  • Maybe the marketers should be a bit more picky about what they slap "AI" on and maybe decision makers should be a little less eager to follow whatever Better Auto complete spits out, but maybe that's just me and we really should be pretending that all these algorithms really have made humans obsolete and generating convincing language is better than correspondence with reality.

    I’m not sure the anti-AI marketing stance is any more solid of a position. Though it’s probably easier to defend, since it’s so vague and not based on anything measurable.

  • I’m not sure the anti-AI marketing stance is any more solid of a position. Though it’s probably easier to defend, since it’s so vague and not based on anything measurable.

    Calling AI measurable is somewhat unfounded. Between not having a coherent, agreed-upon definition of what does and does not constitute an AI (we are, after all, discussing LLMs as though they were AGI), and the difficulty that exists in discussing the qualifications of human intelligence, saying that a given metric covers how well a thing is an AI isn't really founded on anything but preference. We could, for example, say that mathematical ability is indicative of intelligence, but claiming FLOPS is a proxy for intelligence falls rather flat. We can measure things about the various algorithms, but that's an awful long ways off from talking about AI itself (unless we've bought into the marketing hype).

  • Calling AI measurable is somewhat unfounded. Between not having a coherent, agreed-upon definition of what does and does not constitute an AI (we are, after all, discussing LLMs as though they were AGI), and the difficulty that exists in discussing the qualifications of human intelligence, saying that a given metric covers how well a thing is an AI isn't really founded on anything but preference. We could, for example, say that mathematical ability is indicative of intelligence, but claiming FLOPS is a proxy for intelligence falls rather flat. We can measure things about the various algorithms, but that's an awful long ways off from talking about AI itself (unless we've bought into the marketing hype).

    So you’re saying the article’s measurements about AI agents being wrong 70% of the time is made up? Or is AI performance only measurable when the results help anti-AI narratives?

  • This post did not contain any content.

    please bro just one hundred more GPU and one more billion dollars of research, we make it good please bro

  • It’s usually vastly easier to verify an answer than posit one, if you have the patience to do so.

    I usually write 3x the code to test the code itself. Verification is often harder than implementation.

    It really depends on the context. Sometimes there are domains which require solving problems in NP, but where it turns out that most of these problems are actually not hard to solve by hand with a bit of tinkering. SAT solvers might completely fail, but humans can do it. Often it turns out that this means there's a better algorithm that can exploit commanalities in the data. But a brute force approach might just be to give it to an LLM and then verify its answer. Verifying NP problems is easy.

    (This is speculation.)

  • being able to do 30% of tasks successfully is already useful.

    If you have a good testing program, it can be.

    If you use AI to write the test cases...? I wouldn't fly on that airplane.

    obviously

  • Run something with a 70% failure rate 10x and you get to a cumulative 98% pass rate.
    LLMs don't get tired and they can be run in parallel.

    The problem is they are not i.i.d., so this doesn't really work. It works a bit, which is in my opinion why chain-of-thought is effective (it gives the LLM a chance to posit a couple answers first). However, we're already looking at "agents," so they're probably already doing chain-of-thought.

  • I have actually been doing this lately: iteratively prompting AI to write software and fix its errors until something useful comes out. It's a lot like machine translation. I speak fluent C++, but I don't speak Rust, but I can hammer away on the AI (with English language prompts) until it produces passable Rust for something I could write for myself in C++ in half the time and effort.

    I also don't speak Finnish, but Google Translate can take what I say in English and put it into at least somewhat comprehensible Finnish without egregious translation errors most of the time.

    Is this useful? When C++ is getting banned for "security concerns" and Rust is the required language, it's at least a little helpful.

    I'm impressed you can make strides with Rust with AI. I am in a similar boat, except I've found LLMs are terrible with Rust.

  • No, it matters. Youre pushing the lie they want pushed.

    Hitler liked to paint, doesn't make painting wrong. The fact that big tech is pushing AI isn't evidence against the utility of AI.

    That common parlance is to call machine learning "AI" these days doesn't matter to me in the slightest. Do you have a definition of "intelligence"? Do you object when pathfinding is called AI? Or STRIPS? Or bots in a video game? Dare I say it, the main difference between those AIs and LLMs is their generality -- so why not just call it GAI at this point tbh. This is a question of semantics so it really doesn't matter to the deeper question. Doesn't matter if you call it AI or not, LLMs work the same way either way.

  • So you’re saying the article’s measurements about AI agents being wrong 70% of the time is made up? Or is AI performance only measurable when the results help anti-AI narratives?

    I would definitely bet it's made up and poorly designed.

    I wish that weren't the case because having actual data would be nice, but these are almost always funded with some sort of intentional slant, for example nic vape safety where they clearly don't use the product sanely and then make wild claims about how there's lead in the vapes!

    Homie you're fucking running the shit completely dry for longer then any humans could possible actually hit the vape, no shit it's producing carcinogens.

    Go burn a bunch of paper and directly inhale the smoke and tell me paper is dangerous.

  • I would definitely bet it's made up and poorly designed.

    I wish that weren't the case because having actual data would be nice, but these are almost always funded with some sort of intentional slant, for example nic vape safety where they clearly don't use the product sanely and then make wild claims about how there's lead in the vapes!

    Homie you're fucking running the shit completely dry for longer then any humans could possible actually hit the vape, no shit it's producing carcinogens.

    Go burn a bunch of paper and directly inhale the smoke and tell me paper is dangerous.

    Agreed. 70% is astoundingly high for today’s models. Something stinks.

  • We have created the overconfident intern in digital form.

    Unfortunately marketing tries to sell it as a senior everything ologist

  • 30 Stimmen
    6 Beiträge
    5 Aufrufe
    moseschrute@piefed.socialM
    While I agree, everyone constantly restating this is not helpful. We should instead ask ourselves what’s about BlueSky is working and what can we learn? For example, I think the threadiverse could benefit from block lists, which auto update with new filter keywords. I’ve seen Lemmy users talk about how much time they spend crafting their filters to get the feed of content they want. It would be much nicer if you could choose and even combine block lists (e.g. US politics).
  • 63 Stimmen
    26 Beiträge
    63 Aufrufe
    lordwiggle@lemmy.worldL
    ..... And it sucks
  • 1 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    3 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 21 Stimmen
    19 Beiträge
    72 Aufrufe
    B
    The AI only needs to alert the doctor that something is off and should be tested for. It does not replace doctors, but augments them. It's actually a great use for AI, it's just not what we think of as AI in a post-LLM world. The medically useful AI is pattern recognition. LLMs may also help doctors if they need a starting point into researching something weird and obscure, but ChatGPT isn't being used for diagnosing patients, nor is anything any AI says the "final verdict". It's just a tool to improve early detection of disorders, or it might point someone towards an useful article or book.
  • JavaScript™ Trademark Update | Deno

    Technology technology
    4
    1
    71 Stimmen
    4 Beiträge
    22 Aufrufe
    D
    Godspeed Deno and mandatory fuck Oracle
  • 288 Stimmen
    46 Beiträge
    316 Aufrufe
    G
    Just for the record, even in Italy the winter tires are required for the season (but we can just have chains on board and we are good). Double checking and it doesn’t seem like it? Then again I don’t live in Italy. Here in Sweden you’ll face a fine of ~2000kr (roughly 200€) per tire on your vehicle that is out of spec. https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/travelling-motor-vehicles/motor-vehicles/winter-tyres-in-europe.html Well, I live in Italy and they are required at least in all the northern regions and over a certain altitude in all the others from 15th November to 15th April. Then in some regions these limits are differents as you have seen. So we in Italy already have a law that consider a different situation for the same rule. Granted that you need to write a more complex law, but in the end it is nothing impossible. …and thus it is much simpler to handle these kinds of regulations at a lower level. No need for everyone everywhere to agree, people can have rules that work for them where they live, folks are happier and don’t have to struggle against a system run by bureaucrats so far away they have no idea what reality on the ground is (and they can’t, it’s impossible to account for every scenario centrally). Even on a municipal level certain regulations differ, and that’s completely ok! So it is not that difficult, just write a directive that say: "All the member states should make laws that require winter tires in every place it is deemed necessary". I don't really think that making EU more integrated is impossibile
  • 297 Stimmen
    24 Beiträge
    95 Aufrufe
    S
    This is not a typical home or office printer, very specialized.
  • 360 Stimmen
    24 Beiträge
    92 Aufrufe
    F
    If only they didn’t fake it to get their desired result, then maybe it could have been useful. I agree that LiDAR and other technologies should be used in conjunction with regular cameras. I don’t know why anyone would be against that unless they have vested interests. For various reasons though I understand that it isn’t always possible - price being a big one.