In a recent interview with Varun Mayya and Tanmaya Bhatt on their YouTube show Overpowered, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, made a bold prediction: AI will surpass human coders by the end of this year.
Weil was responding to Anthropic's claim that coding automation would not become a reality until 2027, but he confidently countered, stating, "At the rate we're going, I would be surprised if it’s 2027. I think it’s going to be sooner."
In a separate interview with Mike Forman on the YouTube channel Council on Foreign Relations, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could be responsible for writing 90% of all code within the next 3-6 months, with the potential to automate "nearly all coding" within a year.
This forecast suggests a future where AI takes over the majority of coding tasks, fundamentally reshaping the software development industry. This sentiment was echoed by Weil in his discussion of OpenAI's AI advancements.
Weil shared insights into the progress of OpenAI’s AI models, revealing how each new version of GPT has made significant strides in competitive coding. "GPT-01 preview was, I think, the best like the millionth-best competitive programmer in the world," he remarked.
"This doesn’t sound great, but there are around 30-40 million programmers globally, so you’re in the top 2-3%," he said.
However, with the arrival of GPT-03, OpenAI had already made a giant leap. According to Weil, this model now ranks among the top 175 competitive programmers worldwide. And with future versions currently being trained, he believes they will surpass even this.
"I think this is the year that, at least by competitive coding benchmarks, AI becomes better than humans at competitive coding forever," Weil stated.
"In the same way that computers surpassed humans at multiplication 70 years ago and AI overtook humans at chess 15 years ago, this is the year AI surpasses humans in programming and there’s no going back," he stressed.
Despite this rapid advancement, Weil noted that human expertise will continue to be valuable.
"Understanding what problems to solve, where to focus your work, where the leverage is... those kinds of things will still matter," he explained.
Weil doesn’t believe AI will replace humans entirely. Instead, he envisions a future where AI will complement every job.
"You’re going to be using it day in and day out to augment yourself in your work," he predicted.
"People are going to increasingly become managers of these AI 'employees', overseeing the basic tasks that they perform," he said.
In conclusion, while AI’s capabilities in coding continue to advance at a rapid pace, human input will remain essential for guiding and managing these systems. The future of programming, according to Weil, will be one of collaboration between human experts and AI-powered tools.