There’s been some worry about whether AI will replace programmers, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that at least in the short term, it could make them extremely productive.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that coders could become 10x more efficient with AI. He said that he wasn’t as interested in fully replacing coders, or 100 percent automation with AI, as with making human coders more productive. “It’s the degree of automation that matters. You can make a complex (AI) thing and never touch code — that’s one thing. But I’m less interested in that question than when a coder becomes 10 times more productive. And I think that can happen this year, or next year,” he said on the Varun Mayya podcast.
Altman also addressed how India’s IT industry, which employed millions of coders, would cope with the change. “If there’s one area where I think the world has much more demand than we can currently supply, it’s for code,” he said. “My belief is that the world just wants way more software, and is about to get it. And if you give people these tools to write software much more effectively, I at least think that for a while, what will happen is someone who can write code today at some value will be able to write code or create software at some much higher value. Now they’ll have to pay the AI a lot, so they won’t capture all of that. Also, the market price for a piece of code will go down. But I would bet that this is an example..of Jevon’s Paradox,” he said.
Jevon’s Paradox refers to how the increased efficiency in resource use can lead to increased consumption of that resource. Altman seemed to be suggesting as code became easier to write, and cheaper, there would be more demand for it than before.
Altman has previously said that he believes that AI will get exponentially better at programming very quickly. He’s said that the world’s best programmer will be an AI by the end of 2025. His pronouncements, along with those of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who said that AI would be writing nearly all code in a few years, and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, who’s said that 95 percent of code will be written by AI in five years, had seemed to foretell a dire future for the coding industry. But it appears that Altman believes that as coding becomes easier, the demand for software will increase dramatically, helping offset AI’s impact. Coders would hope he’s right — if the demand for software doesn’t keep pace with productivity improvements, the software sector could be looking at plenty of turmoil in the coming years.