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AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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I'd just like to point out that, from the perspective of somebody watching AI develop for the past 10 years, completing 30% of automated tasks successfully is pretty good! Ten years ago they could not do this at all. Overlooking all the other issues with AI, I think we are all irritated with the AI hype people for saying things like they can be right 100% of the time -- Amazon's new CEO actually said they would be able to achieve 100% accuracy this year, lmao. But being able to do 30% of tasks successfully is already useful.
It doesn't matter if you need a human to review. AI has no way distinguishing between success and failure. Either way a human will have to review 100% of those tasks.
Right, so this is really only useful in cases where either it's vastly easier to verify an answer than posit one, or if a conventional program can verify the result of the AI's output.
A human can review something close to correct a lot better than starting the task from zero.
It is a lot harder to notice incorrect information in review, than making sure it is correct when writing it.
Please stop.
I'm not claiming that the use of AI is ethical. If you want to fight back you have to take it seriously though.
It cant do 30% of tasks vorrectly. It can do tasks correctly as much as 30% of the time, and since it's llm shit you know those numbers have been more massaged than any human in history has ever been.
I meant the latter, not "it can do 30% of tasks correctly 100% of the time."
You get how that's fucking useless, generally?
yes, that's generally useless. It should not be shoved down people's throats. 30% accuracy still has its uses, especially if the result can be programmatically verified.
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.
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.
What's 0.7^10?
About 0.02
So the chances of it being right ten times in a row are 2%.
No the chances of being wrong 10x in a row are 2%. So the chances of being right at least once are 98%.
Ah, my bad, you're right, for being consistently correct, I should have done 0.3^10=0.0000059049
so the chances of it being right ten times in a row are less than one thousandth of a percent.
No wonder I couldn't get it to summarise my list of data right and it was always lying by the 7th row.
That looks better. Even with a fair coin, 10 heads in a row is almost impossible.
And if you are feeding the output back into a new instance of a model then the quality is highly likely to degrade.
Less broadly useful than 20 tons of mixed texture human shit, and more ecologically devastatimg.
Are you just trolling or do you seriously not understand how something which can do a task correctly with 30% reliability can be made useful if the result can be automatically verified.
Its not a magical 30%, factors apply. It's not even a mind that thinks and just isnt very good.
This isnt like a magical dice that gives you truth on a 5 or a 6, and lies on 1,2,3,7, and for.
This is a (very complicated very large) language or other data graph that programmatically identifies an average. 30% of the time-according to one potempkin-ass demonstration. Which means the more possible that is, the easier it is to either use a simpler cheaper tool that will give you a better more reliable answer much faster.
And 20 tons of human shit has uses! If you know its providence, there's all sorts of population level public health surveillance you can do to get ahead of disease trends! Its also got some good agricultural stuff in it-phosphorous and stuff, if you can extract it.
Stop. Just please fucking stop glazing these NERVE-ass fascist shit-goblins.
I think everyone in the universe is aware of how LLMs work by now, you don't need to explain it to someone just because they think LLMs are more useful than you do.
IDK what you mean by glazing but if by "glaze" you mean "understanding the potential threat of AI to society instead of hiding under a rock and pretending it's as useless as a plastic radio," then no, I won't stop.
It's absolutely dangerous but it doesnt have to work even a little to do damage; hell, it already has. Your thing just makes it sound much more capable than it is. And it is not.
Also, it's not AI.
semantics.
No, it matters. Youre pushing the lie they want pushed.