Don’t learn to code: Nvidia’s founder Jensen Huang advises a different career path::Don’t learn to code advises Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Thanks to AI everybody will soon become a capable programmer simply using human language.

  • paf0@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    8 months ago

    It’s just going to create a summary story about the code base and reference that story as it implements features, not that different that a human. It’s not necessarily something it can do now but it will come. Developers are not special, and I was never talking about Copilot.

    • kescusay@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      I don’t think most people grok just how hard implementing that kind of joined-up thinking and metacognition is.

      You’re right, developers aren’t special, except in those ways all humans are, but we’re a very long way indeed from being able to simulate them in AI - especially in large language models. Humans automatically engage in joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and so on, without having to consciously try. Those are all things a large language model literally can’t do.

      It doesn’t know anything. It can’t conceptualize a “summary story,” or understand parts that it might get wrong in such a story. It’s glorified autocomplete.

      And that can be extraordinarily useful, but only if we’re honest with ourselves about what it is and is not capable of.

      Companies that decide to replace their developers with one guy using ChatGPT or Gemini or something will fail, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future.

      • paf0@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        8 months ago

        Try for a second to think beyond what they’re able to do now and think about the future. Also, educate yourself on Autogen and CrewAI, you actually haven’t addressed anything I said because you’re too busy pontificating.

        • kescusay@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          Try for a second to think beyond what they’re able to do now and think about the future.

          I am. In the future, they will need to be able to perform tasks using joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and metacognition if they’re going to replace people like me with AI. And that is a very hard goal to achieve. Maybe not P = NP hard, but by no means trivial.

          Also, educate yourself on Autogen and CrewAI, you actually haven’t addressed anything I said because you’re too busy pontificating.

          I have. My company looked at Autogen. We concluded it wasn’t worth it. The solution to AI agents not being able to actually understand what they’re doing isn’t to amplify the problem by creating teams of them.

          Every few years, something new comes along driven by incredible hype, and people declare programming to be dead. They insist a robot will be able to do my job. I have yet to see a technology that will plausibly do that in ten years, let alone now. And all the hype is built on a foundation of ignorance over how complicated a modern, enterprise-ready application is, and how necessary being able to think about its many moving parts is.

          You know who doesn’t suffer from that ignorance? Microsoft, the creators of Autogen. And they’re currently hiring developers, not laying them off and replacing them with Autogen.