AI is rapidly getting better at programming tasks, but it might soon be better than all humans anywhere in the world.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that an AI system will be the world’s best programmer by the end of 2025. “ The progress over the recent scale is quite amazing. Our very first reasoning model was like a top one millionth competitive programmer in the world. People thought that was very impressive. It’s like, wow, an AI, is in the millionth best people that do this, that’s pretty good,” Altman said at an event.
“We then had a model that got to like top 10,000 (programmers). O3, which we talked about publicly in December, is the 175th best competitive programmer in the world. I think our internal benchmark is now around 50, and maybe we’ll hit number one by the end of this year. So, that’s like an amazing rate of scale for more compute in this new paradigm, and we don’t see any signs of that stopping,” he added.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that programming will soo be nothing like what it’s been historically. Even non coders can now give simple instructions in plain English to LLMs, and receive functioning code. There are more sophisticated AI coding platforms like Cursor and Lovable that provide an interface for users to get AI to write and fix their code. OpenAI’s o3 had managed an ELO of 2727 in Competition Code, which made it the 175th best competitive programmer in the world.
And if an AI system is the world’s best programmer — as Sam Altman predicts — in the next 10 months, it could completely upturn the coding industry. AI coders can work 24*7 at a fraction of the cost of human coders, and this could lead to millions of average and below average coders losing their jobs. Former Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque has said that AI systems are already better than outsourced Indian programmers, and will quickly replace them. AI is set to impact all fields, but it appears that the disruption to programming is coming much faster than most people are anticipating.