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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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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.