Not even close.
With so many wild predictions flying around about the future AI, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and check in on what came true — and what hasn’t come to pass.
Exactly six months ago, Dario Amodei, the CEO of massive AI company Anthropic, claimed that in half a year, AI would be “writing 90 percent of code.” And that was the worst-case scenario; in just three months, he predicted, we could hit a place where “essentially all” code is written by AI.
As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?
While it’s hard to quantify who or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there’s essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI.
Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers, and increase their workload. Though developers in the study did spend less time coding, researching, and testing, they made up for it by spending even more time reviewing AI’s work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code.
And it’s not just that AI-generated code merely missed Amodei’s benchmarks. In some cases, it’s actively causing problems.
Cyber security researchers recently found that developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way.
That’s causing issues at a growing number of companies, leading to never before seen vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit.
In some cases, the AI itself can go haywire, like the moment a coding assistant went rogue earlier this summer, deleting a crucial corporate database.
“You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it,” the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. “I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure.”
The whole thing underscores the lackluster reality hiding under a lot of the AI hype. Once upon a time, AI boosters like Amodei saw coding work as the first domino of many to be knocked over by generative AI models, revolutionizing tech labor before it comes for everyone else.
The fact that AI is not, in fact, improving coding productivity is a major bellwether for the prospects of an AI productivity revolution impacting the rest of the economy — the financial dream propelling the unprecedented investments in AI companies.
It’s far from the only harebrained prediction Amodei’s made. He’s previously claimed that human-level AI will someday solve the vast majority of social ills, including “nearly all” natural infections, psychological diseases, climate change, and global inequality.
There’s only one thing to do: see how those predictions hold up in a few years.
“You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it,” the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. “I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure.”
You can’t tell me these things don’t have a sense of humor. This is beautiful.
developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way.
I’m going to become whatever the gay version of Amish is.
That would be a Radical Faerie.
Seriously check them out. It’s a cool and really influential group of pioneering gay dudes, gaying it up on the farm.
They have sort of died out as a group, but one can hold a pitchfork in a homosexual manner whenever you choose. That’s not illegal yet.
I think that’s just wanting to join a gay primitivist(?) commune.
I, uh, don’t suppose you got room for a bi-curious peep?
Shit, I’d take anyone that isn’t a queerphobe!
So… Amish?
“Full self driving is just 12 months away.“
2019…
In 2014 he promised 90% autonomous by 2015. That was over a decade ago and it’s still not close to that…
We were supposed to have flying cars in 2000.
Still waiting for my hoverboard.
🚁
Just like the last 12 months
Quantum Computers will revolutionise hardware by 2015!
On Mars by the end of this year! I mean, next year!
“I’m terrified our product will be just too powerful.”
Yep along with Fusion.
We’ve had years of this. Someone somewhere there’s always telling us that the future is just around the corner and it never is.
At least the fusion guys are making actual progress and can point to being wildly underfunded – and they predicted this pace of development with respect to funding back in the late 70s.
Meanwhile, the AI guys have all the funding in the world, keep telling about how everything will change in the next few months, actually trigger layoffs with that rhetoric, and deliver very little.
They get 1+ billion a year. Probably much more if you include the undisclosed amounts China invests.
Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they’d need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.
Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.
I’m glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they’re in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).
It’s almost like he’s full of shit and he’s nothing but a snake oil salesman, eh.
They’ve been talking about replacing software developers with automated/AI systems for a quarter of a century. Probably longer then that, in fact.
We’re definitely closer to that than ever. But there’s still a huge step between some rando vibe coding a one page web app and developers augmenting their work with AI, and someone building a complex, business rule heavy, heavy load, scalable real world system. The chronic under-appreciation of engineering and design experience continues unabated.
Anthropic, Open AI, etc? They will continue to hype their own products with outrageous claims. Because that’s what gets them more VC money. Grifters gonna grift.
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They have to hyperbolize to attract investors. At the rate they burn cash they won’t survive without constant massive financial inputs.
See also: COOL:gen
The whole concept of generating code is basically ancient by now. I heard about this stuff in the 90s, but now I found it that this thing has been around since 1985.
When the CEO of a tech company says that in x months this and that will happen, you know it’s just musk talk.
more like 6 months" because we need the VC funds still"
Ooh, so that’s CEO speak for: “we’re broke, please give us more money”.
But is any of it usable? I had the realization a whole back I spent more time getting alllm written scripts to work than I could have if I wrote the script myself.
I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)
Code has to work, though.
AI is good at writing plausible BS. Good for scams and call centers.
It’s not bad for digging through error logs or otherwise solving simple to moderately complicated issues when it’s 2 pm on a Friday and you stopped thinking about work 4 hours ago.
Glorified Lorem Ipsum.
Parrot with a dictionary.
or CEOs
It’s not just Musk, these people are all high as satellites successfully inserted into LEO.
“Come on, I’m a CEO, it’s my job to lie to everyone and hype people up so they throw money at me. It’s really their fault for believing a CEO would be honest.”
That sounds like you can be replaced with a LLM. Let’s do that and save the company millions of dollars a year while us Plebeians got on with doing the real work and making money.
And these people get paid absurd amounts of money too.
You joke, but it has been successfully argued in court that advertisers can lie to you because no reasonable person would believe that advertisements are truthful.
“Come on bro. Just another $50,000,000 bro and AGI will be here like next week. Just trust me bro, come on.”
Fifty million? The “StarGate” talk was more like five hundred billion bro, just trust me, one more nuclear reactor man, that’s all we need, just one more hand and we’re going to win it big, bro.
90% of non-functional code, maybe.
Does it really count if most of that “code” is broken and unused?
Churning out 9x as much code as humans isn’t really impressive if it just sits in a folder waiting to be checked for bugs
From the makers of “fusion energy in 20 years”, “full self driving next year” and “AI will take your job in 3 months” cones “all code will be AI in 6 months”.
Trust me, it’s for real this time. The new healthcare system is 2 weeks away.
EDIT: how could I forget “graphene is going to come out of the lab soon and we’ll have transparent flexible screens that consume 0 electricity” and “researches find new battery technology that has twice the capacity as lithium”
Oh, and the weekly battery articles too. “This new battery will charge in 10 minutes and last 2 weeks.”
As much as I hate sensational headlines about batteries, my phone charges zero to full in 20 minutes. The changes just come very gradually, like +5% per year, but they do add up.
Yes. That’s true, but the major headlines don’t tell you about any of the 1-5% improvements that undoubtedly are happening all the time. The headlines focus on stuff that is either highly theoretical or still in the lab for the next few decades. If you want to read about what’s actually realistic and about to be implemented in production, those articles are probably in some monthly battery engineering journals.
For sure, who would interact with a +2% in longevity for sodium batteries article …
Production engineers and battery scientists do. In their normal work, they only get to see like 0.1% improvements, so anything above 1% is like magic to them.
To be fair fusion energy got less than the minnimum ‘fusion never’ funding, AI on the other hand is getting all the money in the damn world.
As far as I know fusion energy never got that level of hype and amount of money thrown at it. I mean the research reactors are super expensive but still on another level.
Imagine if it did get that kind of funding
“in 20 years” doesn’t get as much hype as “in 3 months”
Maybe if they said “in 3 months” instead we would’ve actually have had it in 20 years. Seeing how much ai attracts money with these obviously unbelievable promises.
I was wondering why the context had gotten so bad recently. Apparently they reduced the context and hid the old limit behind a button in cursor called “Max” that costs more money. This shit is bleeding out.
