That nearly happened - it's why OpenAI didn't release open weight models past GPT2, and it's why Google didn't release anything useful built on Transformers despite having invented the architecture.
If we lived in the world today, LLMs would be available only to a small, elite and impossibly well funded class of people. Google and OpenAI would solely get to decide who could explore this new world with them.
I think that would suck.
With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this.
Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest.
In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions.
So broadly where is the net benefit here?
I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.
And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.
Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint.
Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
His workplace has no one with programming skills, this is automation that would never have happened. Of course it’s not exactly replacing a human or anything. I suppose he could have hired someone to write the script but he never really thought to do that.
They used "just" ChatGPT on the web to write an automation. Now the same process takes ~5 minutes of work. Select the correct video segments, click one button to run script.
The actual processing still takes time, but they don't need to stand there watching it progress so they can start the second job.
And this was a 100% non-tecnical marketing person with no programming skills past Excel formulas.
I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!
Currently, if you ask an LLM to do something small and self-contained like solve leetcode problems or implement specific algorithms, they will have a much lower rate of mistakes, in terms of implementing the actual code, than an experienced human engineer. The things it does badly are more about architecture, organization, style, and taste.
Because Excel has no way of doing unit tests or any kind of significant validation. Big BIG things have gone to shit because of Excel.
Things that would have never happened if the same thing was a vibe-coded python script and a CSV.
I think handling sensitive data should be done by professional. A lawyer handles contracts, a doctor handles health issue and a programmer handles data manipulation through programs. This doesn't remove risk of errors completely, but it reduces it significantly.
In my home, it's me who's impacted if I screw up a fix in my plumbing, but I won't try to do it at work or in my child's school.
I don't care if my doctor vibe codes an app to manipulate their holidays pictures, I care if they do it to manipulate my health or personal data.
Bunch of your personal data is most likely going through some Excel made by a now-retired office worker somewhere 15 years ago. Nobody understands how the sheet works, but it works so they keep using it :) A replacement system (a massive SaaS application) has been "coming soon" for 8 years and cost millions, but it still doesn't work as well as the Excel sheet.
One of my life goals is to help bring as many people into my "technology can automate things for you" bubble as I possibly can.
For companies, if these tools make experts even more special, then experts may get more power certainly when it comes to salary.
So the productively benefits of AI have to be pretty high to overcome this. Does AI make an expert twice as productive?
- If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, how big of a price increase companies like Anthropic would need to be profitable?
- If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater blow on the team's knowledge.
- If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will also decline, no? Hmm...