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.

  • da_cow (she/her)@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 hours ago

    As I already stated, AI is my last resort. If something doesn’t work because it has a logical flaw googeling won’t save me. So of course I debug it first, but if I get an Error I have no clue where it comes from no amount of debugging will fix the problem, because probably the Error occurred because I do not know better. I Am not that good of a coder and I Am still learning a lot on a regular basis. And for people like me AI is in fact quite usefull. It has basically become the replacement to pasting your code and Error into stack overflow (which doesn’t even work for since I always get IP banned when trying to sign up)

    • ngdev@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      you never stated you use it as a last resort. you’re basically using ai as a rubber ducky

      • cheloxin@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 hours ago

        I usual try to avoid…

        Just because they didn’t explicitly say the exact words you did doesn’t mean it wasn’t said