The AI hype machine never stops
I read two articles today that showed just how unhinged people are about “AI” right now. It was all doom and gloom, end of the world as we know it stuff. And absolutely ridiculous. I am so damned tired of AI hype.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios report on AI in “Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath”:
AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
“Amodei” is Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. No bias there right? Why on Earth would the CEO of a company that’s behind OpenAI and Google in market share possibly want to spin things this way when his own company is known as the “thoughtful about the impact of AI technology” company? Could it be that Anthropic just released the latest version of their Claude AI model and he would like some press?
Then there was Jesse Singal writing in the latest edition of his newsletter:
He believes that in about 18 months from now, AI computer programmers will have put their human counterparts out of business, simply because they will be able to code at a superhuman level.
This prognostication came from AI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly of OpenAI.
Singal’s article was titled “What Happened When I Asked ChatGPT To Pretend To Be Conscious” with the subtitle “I’m trying not to sound hysterical, but… everything is about to drastically change forever.” We’ve been hearing this for awhile now. I won’t deny that AI tools are getting better but human programmers will be out of business in 18 months?
I use AI almost every day at work. It is very good at a few things. It still also makes a ton of mistakes. At work today we queried GitHub Copilot (using ChatGPT) to tell us the latest supported version of Apache Maven, the Java build tool. A project is using version 3.8.6. Copilot told us the 3.8 line of Maven isn’t supported anymore. This is wrong. The Maven team is supporting 3.8.x and 3.9.x until release 4.0 becomes generally available. It took me less than five minutes to find this information with a Google search and reading the Maven release notes.
Programming is not easy. It is a lot more than pasting a bunch of code. Right now LLMs are copy and paste machines and that is it. This idea that a programmer is simply a copy and paste machine to be replaced is stupid. Can these tools make life easier for a good programmer? Absolutely. Are they going to actually replace a human in 18 months? Fat chance.
Going to file this one under Claim Chowder and check back in 18 months.