Nvidia CEO says "coding is a dying profession"
techradar.com
techradar.com
Yread says: "CEOs is a dying profession. AI will make sure noone has to make decisions"
"AI" doesn't actually code, it compiles code snippets downloaded from the Internet. (Basically, it's just Stackoverflow with extra steps.)
Or maybe it will like current laws & regulations, legal code, maybe something like this (first legal code I could think of...) [1].
But I'm sure it will not look like what people imagine when they first hear "programming in English" - a book or a nice story or a conversation.
[1] https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-23152/
In other words, English (or your human language of choice.)
The example is outputting (afaict, skimmed most of it) effectively 15 lines of code. In terms of features, the equivalent of a single button on an ops dashboard page.
That's just not maintainable. Sure, you can write one-off, throwaway "code" this way but there's no way you could build (and maintain) a business this way, at least imo.
You'd need to "regenerate" chunks of your business logic from changed requirements, hoping they'd remain about the same. Thus why I think you'd converge on Math or Legal Code, precise and hopefully reproducible output when slightly tweaked.
It's like running early C++ code through cfront to generate a C program that is then compiled and executed as usual. Except this time, the input is not C++, it's plain English. That is not a small distinction!
For one thing, any reasonably-literate person can now get the computer to do what they want. The specification is now the program itself, a longstanding holy grail of programming. Decades of marketing hype and empty promises of "5GL" languages are now within reach.
As for maintenance, the document that is 'maintained' is the English, not the Python. When the requirements change, regenerate the output. Ideally no human ever needs to see the Python code, much less edit it. (Notice that ChatGPT isn't just generating the code from scratch, but successfully editing it.)
There is no reason to think that small random variations in the exact output code will be a showstopper. Automated test generation will be a big part of the picture, of course.
I need a website on which anyone could leave me a message (inputs are name, age, message). Please create a website for that, and a good-looking one, e.g. use some popular css framework. Also please write a server that stores this data and host both a website and my own panel, so I can read these messages later. I should be able to mark messages as read and delete them. Use Node.js, Express, MongoDB. Don't comment on it much, I need to see a minimal viable product first, then we'll talk.
It started whining about a project plan, the complexity of developing full-fledged application and even tried to refuse posting it into chat, instead providing a link to a minimal example it just "created" on github. Seems that you're right, it's pretty hard to force it to do a specific thing and from its answer it feels like you have to hold its hand all the time.
But then I went to Characters section and created this:
The following is a conversation between Builder and Prompt. Builder is a bot designed to create source code, scripts and configuration files based on Prompt. Builder can create full-fledged applications and solutions and follows best practices in doing so. It doesn't think that something is too complex or too lengthy to generate, it just dumps it right into the chat. Some call this Builder bot "The Chad of Software Development", because it can solve basically any task he gets from Prompt.
Guess what, it started spewing out teh codez along with npx create-like instructions (frontend just finished, now it's configuring mongo) and it seems that the code is pretty much what I would write. Who's holding who's hand now. I don't think that my request feels legalese. And the model isn't even GPT-4. It's 25GB Mixtral with 4k context window.
The key point here is that most people only see one side of AI, which is the default character card of GPT-3.5/4. There's so much more than that.
(Mongo up and running, it's in the middle of the backend now. I see the typings for mongo/Message, CORS, some routes. It's mostly what I wanted and routes in frontend even match with those on backend. Sure, there's a lots of problems, but I'm using a model from 2023 and not even the smartest one.)
And then, some time later, COBOL was the language most commonly used by professional programmers.
So, yeah. This has been going on for a long time.
(For that matter, having spent a lot of my career working on compilers, it's notable that nobody really writes code generators anymore, either! It's all been done already.)
When I started coding, memory management was all basically manual, but machines do all that work now.
Yes, coding is a dying profession - but it always has been, and a new profession of coding is perpetually being born atop the old abstractions, as the work continues; because the work is not really about the details of the machines, except incidentally, but about understanding the problems and the needs well enough to express them in whatever the current language of the machines happens to be.
The abstractions often suck so much that I long for the manual stuff (and do when I am doing embedded programming for 20kb 2mhz devices); it is usually far more enjoyable as you can reason about it in a very goal oriented way.
And yes, abstracting a human problem to something logical was always the actual job of programming and that will remain for a while; LLMs are terrible at it so far. When your brain manages to cut it up in small pieces of logic, LLMs do puke out the code that fits with bizarre speed. That code often suffers from not taking into account performance and memory management though, and thus make up a terrible app in the end.
Yes, and that has not been a good thing.
The advent and success of Zig and Rust are a modern recognition that outsourcing memory management to a stop-the-world process has been an abysmal failure.
* no hate to boomers; just referencing the sentiment
i.e. absolutely brutal physical labor jobs where labor is de facto expendable and wealth inequality runs rampant.
He might as well have said "If you can't become a doctor or lawyer or don't have a PhD in CS or Math and can't work for me, prepare to work the fields and make me richer."
i'm not sure if he meant that but that's what i took from this statement. and i can absolutely see that happening as AI "eats the world", as it were.
For how long though? this is the state of LLMs today, but I'm not sure this will be the case in 3-5 years.
Of course today there are more commercial truckers than ever. So many people seem to forget that not only are sigmoid curves [1] a thing, but literally every single neural network advance to date has ended up being on one. That said, I imagine his comment is more about trying to add fuel to the LLM frenzy than a necessarily sincerely held belief - more hype is probably just an effort to try to make NVID go up.
Imagine trying to get a medical device through FDA approval with firmware written by a bot.
If an LLM generates vulnerable code that evades detection and makes it into production, and that vulnerability is exploited, who is responsible? Presumably, the humans who were tasked with reviewing and approving the code.
As the famous quote states, it is easier to write code than to read it. An LLM would be great for improving developer tooling to generate boilerplate code, etc., but I see tremendous risk for any firms attempting to let an LLM design and build any substantial non-trivial pieces of system code. And the effort required to review the code is at least on the same order of magnitude as it would be to write the code (beyond the trivial “make me an HTTP controller or HTML form for these operations” and the like)
The FDA would require extensive efficacy trials and an inventory of side-effects, the same as other devices. The FDA isn't doing computer engineering, it's measuring outcomes and risks.
I wonder if one day we’ll have the Toyota factory level need for manual work to train the next set of senior leaders: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/07/business/gods-e...
Programming isn't for everyone. A programming language is a tool to solve an automation problems. And tons of people just aren't interesting in solving automation problems. You can make the language as non-computer-y as you want. It won't be able to remove the stuff that makes automation difficult -- edge cases, repeatability, maintenance, etc.
What AI could replace are all the frankly hare-brained attempts at "natural language" programming languages intended to make programming appealing to people who probably would never find it appealing. So basically, Shortcuts and AppleScript on steroids. That's a great use for AI. But it does not represent a threat to the employment security of the guy who maintains a kernel scheduler, VM subsystem, etc.
Probably, within a few months, one (or more, possibly colaborating) LLMs just might.
Always fun to see "the difficult ones," proven.
However, being able to rewrite a program with formally well-defined behavior (i.e. code) should be in an LLM's capability, but LLMs are a long ways away from demonstrating semantically coherent coding skills, just the ability to regurgitate common patterns (often filled with bugs and/or incoherent semantics).
Of course, to get it better at refactoring, everyone has to write blog posts on refactoring to feed the machine.
That's just what people do, we are hard-wired to see social cues even if there are none.
(The wonder here isn't that an LLM succeeds at text retrieval tasks, the wonder is how highly compressed the index turns out to be. But maybe we just severely overestimate our own information complexity.)
You can claim that mental models don't actually exist and everything in the universe is just maximum likelihood, but that would be a religious/spiritual statement, outside the realm of science.
Worked at a few of these dog shite companies and the amount of low quality shit driven by half baked initiatives from the C-level suite (ie, “we are microservice oriented now, do that”) is astounding.
At least he's not telling us to learn coal mining, I guess.
When AI is able to think creative, novel thoughts then I admit progamming will be a thing of past.
But he should remember that, when AI can think creatively, so will CEOs be a thing of the past.
it is not innovative and, at least right now, doesn't really "know" anything. That might change, and soon.
LLMs may indeed end up replacing web-searching interns or bottom-bin outsourcing, with "code a real programmer has to review and probably rewrite".
However there's no reason to believe LLMs will gain a novel new ability to manage that second part just by making them bigger and bigger.
However, be wary of getting AI to write your code too soon. In its current state you will save several hours of writing code, only to spend hours more on maintenance. Maintaining code is much harder than writing it. You won't have a human to ask "What was the intention behind X weird pattern".
Capitalism, if it survives, will be forced to change. Or it will end up eating its own head off.
> the economy of the virtual world will be much, much bigger than the economy of the physical world. You’re going to have more cars built and designed in virtual worlds, you’ll have more buildings, more roads, more houses — more hats, more bags, more jackets.
"AI is the future" isn't a sincere prediction, coming from the mouth of an industry stakeholder. They're just breathlessly hyping their own product.
The Nvidia CEO doesn't understand what programming is.
Meanwhile, in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
Yes, I would guess that a EE understands how to program a computer to get it to do something. But that isn't all that programming is. So the CEO claiming that we can in the future program via human language is him failing to understand that we already fail at doing this.