It can often be hard to estimate how quickly AI is changing entire industries, but every once in a while a statstic gives some perspective on how big the transformation really is.
Recently, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the man at the helm of the company powering much of the AI revolution through its GPU technology, made a striking claim: more people are using ChatGPT to program computers than are using C++. This highlights not only the explosive growth of generative AI tools, but also their potential to reshape the tech landscape.
“The fact is, there are more people who program computers using ChatGPT today than there are people who program computers using C++,” Huang stated. “That’s a fact. And so, the fact is, (AI) is the greatest force of reducing the technology divide the world’s ever known.”
He continued, emphasizing the relentless momentum of this trend: “The fact of the matter is, it is not stopping, right? It’s not stopping anything. The number of people who are actively using ChatGPT today is off the charts.”
Huang’s excitement about the technology was palpable: “I think it’s terrific. It’s completely terrific. I think people realize the incredible capabilities of AI and how it’s helping them with their work. I use it every single day. I used it this morning. And so, every single day I use it. And I think that that deep research is incredible,” he said.
Huang seemed to be referring to growing practice of vibe coding, which allows users — who might not be programmers — to give instructions to IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf, and let it generate the code. Many people are discovering that they are able to build functional apps and websites by simply telling AI agents what to build. The term vibe coding had been coined by Andrej Karpathy, who’d made a similar prediction a few months prior, saying that the hottest new programming language would be English.
And it’s not just newbies who are using AI tools to code. Even experienced programmers are finding that AI dramatically improves their productivity. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that AI will be as good as a mid-level engineer by 2025, and companies like Salesforce and Inmobi have said that they’ll require fewer software engineers because of the productivity gains from AI.
This is quite a dramatic turnaround for the coding profession, which is among the best-paid jobs in the world. Software development used to take several years to learn and master, but experienced programmers could earn large sums of money in a job that was largely low-stress, and allowed for great work-life balance. But with AI democratizing software development and programming to a degree that ChatGPT is more popular for coding than C++, and much of the advantages of having programming skills have been stripped away, it remains to be seen if programming remains the lucrative career that it once was.