OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go.

GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential applications.

For example, combining a human-moderated knowledge graph with an LLM with RAG allows you to build "expert bots" that understand your business context / your codebase / your specific processes and act almost human-like similar to a coworker in your team.

If you now give it some predictive / simulation capability - eg: simulate the execution of a task or project like creating a github PR code change, and test against an expert bot above for code review, you can have LLMs create reasonable code changes, with automatic review / iteration etc.

Similarly there are many more capabilities that you can ladder on and expose into LLMs to give you increasingly productive outputs from them.

Chasing after model improvements and "GPT-5 will be PHD-level" is moot imo. When did you hire a PHD coworker and they were productive on day-0 ? You need to onboard them with human expertise, and then give them execution space / long-term memories etc to be productive.

Model vendors might struggle to build something more intelligent. But my point is that we already have so much intelligence and we don't know what to do with that. There is a LOT you can do with high-schooler level intelligence at super-human scale.

Take a naive example. 200k context windows are now available. Most people, through ChatGPT, type out maybe 1500 tokens. That's a huge amount of untapped capacity. No human is going to type out 200k of context. Hence why we need RAG, and additional forms of input (eg: simulation outcomes) to fully leverage that.

Yes there seems to be lots of potential. Yes we can brainstorm things that should work. Yes there is a lot of examples of incredible things in isolation. But it's a little bit like those youtube videos showing amazing basketball shots in 1 try, when in reality lots of failed attempts happened beforehand. Except our users experience the failed attempts (LLM replies that are wrong, even when backed by RAG) and it's incredibly hard to hide those from them.

Show me the things you / your team has actually built that has decent retention and metrics concretely proving efficiency improvements.

LLMs are so hit and miss from query to query that if your users don't have a sixth sense for a miss vs a hit, there may not be any efficiency improvement. It's a really hard problem with LLM based tools.

There is so much hype right now and people showing cherry picked examples.

This has been my team's experience (and frustration) as well, and has led us to look at using LLMs for classifying / structuring, but not entrusting an LLM with making a decision based on things like a database schema or business logic.

I think the technology and tooling will get there, but the enormous amount of effort spent trying to get the system to "do the right thing" and the nondeterministic nature have really put us into a camp of "let's only allow the LLM to do things we know it is rock-solid at."

Even this is insanely hard in my opinion. The one thing that you would assume LLM to excel at is spelling and grammar checking for the English language, but even the top model (GPT-4o) can be insanely stupid/unpredictable at times. Take the following example from my tool:

https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=6c9bada92&model=GPT-4o&samples...

5 models are asked if the sentence is correct and GPT-4o got it wrong all 5 times. It keeps complaining that GitHub is spelled like Github, when it isn't. Note, only 2 weeks ago, Claude 3.5 Sonnet did the same thing.

I do believe LLM is a game changer, but I'm not convinced it is designed to be public-facing. I see LLM as a power tool for domain experts, and you have to assume whatever it spits out may be wrong, and your process should allow for it.

Edit:

I should add that I'm convinced that not one single model will rule them all. I believe there will be 4 or 5 models that everybody will use and each will be used to challenge one another for accuracy and confidence.

While LLMs do plenty of awful things, people make the most incredibly stupid mistakes too, and that is what LLMs needs to be benchmarked against. The problem is that most of the people evaluating LLMs are better educated than most and often smarter than most. When you see any quantity of prompts input by a representative sample of LLM losers, you quickly lose all faith in humanity.

I'm not saying LLMs are good enough. They're not. But we will increasingly find that there are large niches where LLMs are horrible and error prone yet still outperform the people companies are prepared to pay to do the task.

In other words, on one hand you'll have domain experts becoming expert LLM-wranglers. On the other hand you'll have public-facing LLMs eating away at tasks done by low paid labour where people can work around their stupid mistakes with process or just accepting the risk, same as they currently do with undertrained labor.

This means that on one hand firms are demanding RTO for culture and team work improvements. While on the other they will be ok with a tool that makes unpredictable errors like humans, but can never be impacted by culture and team work.

These two ideas lie in odd juxtaposition to each other.

This more marginal labor is going to be more easy to replace. Also plenty of the more "elite" type labor will too, as it turns out it is more marginal. Already glue and boilerplate programming work is going this way, there is just so much more to do, and the important work of figuring out what should be done, that it hasn't displaced programmers yet. But it will for some fraction. WYSIWG type websites for small business has come a long way and will only get better, so there will be less need for customization on the margin. Or light design work (like take my logo and plug into into this format for this charity tournament flyer).