It's worth noting, that it can do things like that because of the large amount of "how to do simple things in java" tutorials there are on the internet.
Ask an AI to _make_ java, and it won't (and will continue to not) be able to.
That's the level that AI will fail at, when things aren't easily indexed from the internet and thus much harder / impossible to put into a training set.
I think the technology itself (transformers and other such statistical models) have exhausted most of their low hanging fruit by now.
Sora, for example, isn't a grand innovation in the way latent space models, word2vec, or transformers are, it's just a MUCH larger model than DALLE-3. which is great! but still has the limits inherit to statistical models. They need the training data.
Much like the same points made elsewhere with regard to AI art: It cannot invent. It can remix, recombine, etc. but no AI model we have now is anywhere close to where it could create something entirely new that's not been seen before.
What level do you think 'invention' have to be to count as something AI can't do?
The only thing AI needs is a feedback loop and a benchmark/cost function.
If the cost function is page impressions, thats easy. If its running unit tests based from business requirements, thats easy too.
You’re forgetting about data. AI needs data. It’s arguably the most important thing any statistical model needs.
That data must come from somewhere.
There’s no free lunch.
And I think many assumptions on this front are products of magical thinking that are discarding limitations of LLMs in favor of waiting for the intelligence to emerge from the machine, which isn't going to happen. ChatGPT and associated tech is cool, but it is, at the end of the day, pattern recognition and reproduction. That's it. It cannot invent something not before seen, or in our case here, it cannot write code that's never been written.
Now that doesn't make it useless, there's tons of code that's being written all the time that's been written thousands of times before. But it does mean depending what you're trying to build, you will run into it's limitations pretty quickly and have to start writing it yourself. And that being the case... why not just do that in the first place?
> We never had technology which can write code like this. I prompted ChatGPT to write a very basic java tool which renders an image from an url and makes it bigger on a click. It just did it.
Which it did, because as the other comment said, tons of people already have.
> Its not clear at all how fast we will progress but i'm pretty sure, we will hit a time were every junior is worse than AI which will force people of rethinking what they are going to do. Do i hire an junior and train him/her? Or do i prefer to invest more into AI? The gap will widen and widen, a generation or a certain amount of people will stay longer and might be able to stay in development but a lot of others might just not.
I mean, this sounds like an absolute crisis in the making for software dev as a profession, when the entire industry is reliant on a small community of actual programmers overseeing tons of robot junior devs turning out mediocre code. But to each their own I suppose.
I get a requirement, find a solution and the solution is 99,99999% not a new algorithm. I actually believe i never invented a new algorithm.
Besides the next step is reasoning in GPT-5 and devin shows that GPTs/LLMs can start breaking down tasks.
I don't mind being wrong tbh, there is no risk in it for me if AI will not take my job but i don't believe it. I do believve the progress will be better and better and AI will do more and more reasoning.
It can easily try and do things 1000x fater than us, including reasoning. Its not hard to see that it will also be able to create its own examples and learn from them.
I can think of tons of things I do in my day-to-day programming that, while certainly not new or remarkable advances in technology, are at least new enough that you're not going to find a Stack Overflow thread for it.
Again, you guys are pointing to a code generator that can generate functions or code snippets to accomplish a particular task, and again, that is cool and I think it has a huge usage if nothing else as an assistive learning tool when you're trying to pick up a new language or get better with a library or what have you. But again, my point is, ask it to do something that doesn't appear in a bunch of those threads. Ask it to solve a particular bugbear problem in your codebase. Ask it to invent a new language, even a high level one.
> It can easily try and do things 1000x fater than us, including reasoning
AI is not a reasoning machine, though. I'd be very interested in what you mean by the word "reasoning" in this context.
I don't. I might solve current issues, new error messages from new/other libraries etc. but not something novel new.
"reasoning": thinking about a problem, reasoning about potential solutions, estimating the best action, executing it, retrying.
Reasoning in sense of, if the error message indicates a hibernate issue, reducing the search space for solution finding.
At least ai will stay put.
But most of us will be getting by on basic income. Or banging on the gates of robo guarded walls begging for food.
All of what you wrote in your second paragraph will become something AI will be doing better and faster than you.
We never had technology which can write code like this. I prompted ChatGPT to write a very basic java tool which renders an image from an url and makes it bigger on a click. It just did it.
Its not hard to think further and a lot of technology is already going into this direction. Alone last week devin was showne. Gemini has a window token of 1 Million tokens. Groq shows us how it will feel to have instant response.
Right now its already good enough that people with Copilot like to keep it when asked. We already now pay billions for AI daily. This means the amount of research, business motivation and money flowing into it now is probably staggering in comparision to what moved this field a few years ago.
Its not clear at all how fast we will progress but i'm pretty sure, we will hit a time were every junior is worse than AI which will force people of rethinking what they are going to do. Do i hire an junior and train him/her? Or do i prefer to invest more into AI? The gap will widen and widen, a generation or a certain amount of people will stay longer and might be able to stay in development but a lot of others might just not.