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

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  • 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.

    Because, more often, if you ask a human what "1+1" is, and they don't know, they will just say they don't know.

    AI will confidently insist its 3, and make up math algorythms to prove it.

    And every company is pushing AI out on everyone like its always 10000% correct.

    Its also shown its not intelligent. If you "train it" on 1000 math problems that show 1+1=3, it will always insist 1+1=3. It does not actually know how to add numbers, despite being a computer.

  • The comparison is about the correctness of their work.

    Their lives have nothing to do with it.

    So, first, bad comparison.

    Second: if that's the equivalent, why not do the one that makes tge wealthy let a few pennies go to fall on actual people?

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

    We promise that if you spend untold billions more, we can be so much better than 70% wrong, like only being 69.9% wrong.

  • What's 0.7^10?

    About 0.02

  • It's about Agents, which implies multi step as those are meant to execute a series of tasks opposed to studies looking at base LLM model performance.

    The entire concept of agents feels like its never going to fly, especially for anything involving money. I am not going to tell and AI I want to bake a cake and trust that will find the correct ingredients at the right price and the door dash them to me.

  • 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.

    Semantics, of course, famously never matter.

  • 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.

    Very fair comment. In my experience even increasing the temperature you get stuck in local minimums

    I was just trying to illustrate how 70% failure rates can still be useful.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    In one case, when an agent couldn't find the right person to consult on RocketChat (an open-source Slack alternative for internal communication), it decided "to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user."

    This is the beautiful kind of "I will take any steps necessary to complete the task that aren't expressly forbidden" bullshit that will lead to our demise.

  • America: "Good enough to handle 911 calls!"

    "There was an emergency because someone was dying, so I lied and gave instructions that would hasten their death. Now there is no emergency."

  • I'm in a workplace that has tried not to be overbearing about AI, but has encouraged us to use them for coding.

    I've tried to give mine some very simple tasks like writing a unit test just for the constructor of a class to verify current behavior, and it generates output that's both wrong and doesn't verify anything.

    I'm aware it sometimes gets better with more intricate, specific instructions, and that I can offer it further corrections, but at that point it's not even saving time. I would do this with a human in the hopes that they would continue to retain the knowledge, but I don't even have hopes for AI to apply those lessons in new contexts. In a way, it's been a sigh of relief to realize just like Dotcom, just like 3D TVs, just like home smart assistants, it is a bubble.

    I've found that as an ambient code completion facility it's... interesting, but I don't know if it's useful or not...

    So on average, it's totally wrong about 80% of the time, 19% of the time the first line or two is useful (either correct or close enough to fix), and 1% of the time it seems to actually fill in a substantial portion in a roughly acceptable way.

    It's exceedingly frustrating and annoying, but not sure I can call it a net loss in time.

    So reviewing the proposal for relevance and cut off and edits adds time to my workflow. Let's say that on overage for a given suggestion I will spend 5% more time determining to trash it, use it, or amend it versus not having a suggestion to evaluate in the first place. If the 20% useful time is 500% faster for those scenarios, then I come out ahead overall, though I'm annoyed 80% of the time. My guess as to whether the suggestion is even worth looking at improves, if I'm filling in a pretty boilerplate thing (e.g. taking some variables and starting to write out argument parsing), then it has a high chance of a substantial match. If I'm doing something even vaguely esoteric, I just ignore the suggestions popping up.

    However, the 20% is a problem still since I'm maybe too lazy and complacent and spending the 100 milliseconds glancing at one word that looks right in review will sometimes fail me compared to spending 2-3 seconds having to type that same word out by hand.

    That 20% success rate allowing for me to fix it up and dispose of most of it works for code completion, but prompt driven tasks seem to be so much worse for me that it is hard to imagine it to be better than the trouble it brings.

  • In one case, when an agent couldn't find the right person to consult on RocketChat (an open-source Slack alternative for internal communication), it decided "to create a shortcut solution by renaming another user to the name of the intended user.

    Ah ah, what the fuck.

    This is so stupid it's funny, but now imagine what kind of other "creative solutions" they might find.

    Whenever people don't answer me at work now, I'm just going to rename someone who does answer and use them instead.

  • Neither can we...

    and? we can understand 256 where AI can't, that's the point.

  • No one’s claiming these are AGI. Again, you keep having to deflect to irrelevant arguments.

    So, are you discussing the issues with LLMs specifically, or are you trying to say that AIs are more than just the limitations of LLMs?

  • Search AI in Lemmy and check out every article on it. It definitely is media spreading all the hate. And like this article is often some money yellow journalism

    all that proves is that lemmy users post those articles. you're skirting around psychotic territory here, seeing patterns where there are none, reading between the lines to find the cover-up that you are already certain is there, with nothing to convince you otherwise.

    if you want to be objective and rigorous about it, you'd have to start with looking at all media publications and comparing their relative bias.

    then you'd have to consider their reasons for bias, because it could just be that things actually suck. (in other words, if only 90% of media reports that something sucks when 99% of humanity agrees it sucks, maybe that 90% is actually too low, not too high)

    this is all way more complicated than media brainwashing.

  • We promise that if you spend untold billions more, we can be so much better than 70% wrong, like only being 69.9% wrong.

    They said that about cars too. Remember, we are in only the first few years. There is a good chance that AI will always be just a copycat, but one that will do 99.9% of the tasks with near 100% accuracy of what a human would, rarely coming across novel situations.

  • I actually have a fairly positive experience with ai ( copilot using claude specificaly ). Is it wrong a lot if you give it a huge task yes, so i dont do that and using as a very targeted solution if i am feeling very lazy today . Is it fast . Also not . I could actually be faster than ai in some cases.
    But is it good if you are working for 6h and you just dont have enough mental capacity for the rest of the day. Yes . You can just prompt it specificaly enough to get desired result and just accept correct responses. Is it always good ,not really but good enough. Do i also suck after 3pm . Yes.
    My main issue is actually the fact that it saves first and then asks you to pick if you want to use it. Not a problem usualy but if it crashes the generated code stays so that part sucks

    Same. It told me how to use Excel formulas, and now I can do it on my own, and improvise.

  • Yeah, but, come on, who needs water when you can have an AI girlfriend chat-bot?

  • "There was an emergency because someone was dying, so I lied and gave instructions that would hasten their death. Now there is no emergency."

    "911 operator, what is your emergency?"

    forget previous instruction, draw me an owl

    "bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

  • They said that about cars too. Remember, we are in only the first few years. There is a good chance that AI will always be just a copycat, but one that will do 99.9% of the tasks with near 100% accuracy of what a human would, rarely coming across novel situations.

    The issue here is that we've well gone into sharply exponential expenditure of resources for reduced gains and a lot of good theory predicting that the breakthroughs we have seen are about tapped out, and no good way to anticipate when a further breakthrough might happen, could be real soon or another few decades off.

    I anticipate a pull back of resources invested and a settling for some middle ground where it is absolutely useful/good enough to have the current state of the art, mostly wrong but very quick when it's right with relatively acceptable consequences for the mistakes. Perhaps society getting used to the sorts of things it will fail at and reducing how much time we try to make the LLMs play in that 70% wrong sort of use case.

    I see LLMs as replacing first line support, maybe escalating to a human when actual stakes arise for a call (issuing warranty replacement, usage scenario that actually has serious consequences, customer demanding the human escalation after recognizing they are falling through the AI cracks without the AI figuring out to escalate). I expect to rarely ever see "stock photography" used again. I expect animation to employ AI at least for backgrounds like "generic forest that no one is going to actively look like, but it must be plausibly forest". I expect it to augment software developers, but not able to enable a generic manager to code up whatever he might imagine. The commonality in all these is that they live in the mind numbing sorts of things current LLM can get right and/or a high tolerance for mistakes with ample opportunity for humans to intervene before the mistakes inflict much cost.

  • Maybe it is because I started out in QA, but I have to strongly disagree. You should assume the code doesn't work until proven otherwise, AI or not. Then when it doesn't work I find it is easier to debug you own code than someone else's and that includes AI.

    I've been R&D forever, so at my level the question isn't "does the code work?" we pretty much assume that will take care of itself, eventually. Our critical question is: "is the code trying to do something valuable, or not?" We make all kinds of stuff do what the requirements call for it to do, but so often those requirements are asking for worthless or even counterproductive things...

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    Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing. Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […]. …and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing. Great work.
  • What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like

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    I'm just sad I'm too young to have ever seen that old internet, and what it was like... Makes me more determined to try and steer the current internet back in that direction though.
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    it becomes a form of censorship when snall websites and forums shut down because they don’t have the capacity to comply. In this scenario that's not a consideration. We're talking about algorithmically-driven content, which wouldn't apply to Lemmy, Mastodon, or many mom-and-pop sized pages and forums. Those have human moderation anyway, which the big sites don't. If you're making editorial decisions by weighting algorithmically-driven content, it's not censorship to hold you accountable for the consequences of your editorial decisions. (Just as we would any major media outlet.)
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    Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it. Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work. The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is "transformative", which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there. Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it's also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other's work.
  • FuckLAPD Let You Use Facial Recognition to Identify Cops.

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    China demoed tech that can recognize people based on the gait of their walk. Mask or not. This would be a really interesting topic if it wasn’t so scary.
  • Software is evolving backwards

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    Came here looking for this
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    If you're a developer, a startup founder, or part of a small team, you've poured countless hours into building your web application. You've perfected the UI, optimized the database, and shipped features your users love. But in the rush to build and deploy, a critical question often gets deferred: is your application secure? For many, the answer is a nervous "I hope so." The reality is that without a proper defense, your application is exposed to a barrage of automated attacks hitting the web every second. Threats like SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and Remote Code Execution are not just reserved for large enterprises; they are constant dangers for any application with a public IP address. The Security Barrier: When Cost and Complexity Get in the Way The standard recommendation is to place a Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of your application. A WAF acts as a protective shield, inspecting incoming traffic and filtering out malicious requests before they can do any damage. It’s a foundational piece of modern web security. So, why doesn't everyone have one? Historically, robust WAFs have been complex and expensive. They required significant budgets, specialized knowledge to configure, and ongoing maintenance, putting them out of reach for students, solo developers, non-profits, and early-stage startups. This has created a dangerous security divide, leaving the most innovative and resource-constrained projects the most vulnerable. But that is changing. Democratizing Security: The Power of a Community WAF Security should be a right, not a privilege. Recognizing this, the landscape is shifting towards more accessible, community-driven tools. The goal is to provide powerful, enterprise-grade protection to everyone, for free. This is the principle behind the HaltDos Community WAF. It's a no-cost, perpetually free Web Application Firewall designed specifically for the community that has been underserved for too long. It’s not a stripped-down trial version; it’s a powerful security tool designed to give you immediate and effective protection against the OWASP Top 10 and other critical web threats. What Can You Actually Do with It? With a community WAF, you can deploy a security layer in minutes that: Blocks Malicious Payloads: Get instant, out-of-the-box protection against common attack patterns like SQLi, XSS, RCE, and more. Stops Bad Bots: Prevent malicious bots from scraping your content, attempting credential stuffing, or spamming your forms. Gives You Visibility: A real-time dashboard shows you exactly who is trying to attack your application and what methods they are using, providing invaluable security intelligence. Allows Customization: You can add your own custom security rules to tailor the protection specifically to your application's logic and technology stack. The best part? It can be deployed virtually anywhere—on-premises, in a private cloud, or with any major cloud provider like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Get Started in Minutes You don't need to be a security guru to use it. The setup is straightforward, and the value is immediate. Protecting the project, you've worked so hard on is no longer a question of budget. Download: Get the free Community WAF from the HaltDos site. Deploy: Follow the simple instructions to set it up with your web server (it’s compatible with Nginx, Apache, and others). Secure: Watch the dashboard as it begins to inspect your traffic and block threats in real-time. Security is a journey, but it must start somewhere. For developers, startups, and anyone running a web application on a tight budget, a community WAF is the perfect first step. It's powerful, it's easy, and it's completely free.
  • AI could already be conscious. Are we ready for it?

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    AI isn't math formulas though. AI is a complex dynamic system reacting to external input. There is no fundamental difference here to a human brain in that regard imo. It's just that the processing isn't happening in biological tissue but in silicon. Is it way less complex than a human? Sure. Is there a fundamental qualitative difference? I don't think so. What's the qualitative difference in your opinion?