Comment by crystal_revenge
9 days ago
Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns?
2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines.
2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were just boring to write.
2024-2025 My day to day usage has decreased. The models seem better at fact finding but worse for code. None of those "cool" prototypes from myself or anyone else I knew seemed to be able to become more than just that. Many of the cool companies I started learning about in 2022 started to reduce staff and are running into financial troubles.
The only area where I've been impressed is the relatively niche improvements in open source text/image to video models. It's wild that you can make sure animated films on a home computer now.
But even there I'm seeing no signs of "exponential improvement".
I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries this month. I'm an MLE by trade and it would have taken me ages without AI. This wasn't possible even a year ago. I have no idea how anyone thinks the models haven't improved
> This wasn't possible even a year ago.
My experience has been that it was. I was using AI last year to build ML models about as well as I have been this year.
I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the progress certainly looks to be sigmoid not exponential in growth. By far the biggest year for improvement was 2022-2023. Early 2022 I didn't think any of the code assistants were useful, by 2023 I was able to use them more reliably. 2024 was another big improvement, but I honestly haven't felt the change (at least not for the better).
Some of the tooling may be better, but that has little do to with exponential progress in AI itself.
Wow really? The agentic coding work that has come out in the last year are super impressive to me.
And before it didn’t seem to understand the fundamentals of Torch well, not well enough to do novel work. Now with Codex in high it absolutely does, and MLE bench reflects that