AI is becoming increasingly good at coding, and more and more experts seem to agree that it could end up substituting much of the work that humans are doing right now.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that by 2025, Meta will be able to develop and deploy AI systems that code as well as a “mid-level engineer”. “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said in a podcast with Joe Rogan.
“And once you have that, then in the beginning, it will be really expensive to run. And then you can get it to be more efficient and then over time, we’ll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and, and including the AI that we generate, is actually going to be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers,” he added.
Meta has its own class of Large Language Models named Llama. It’s spending a lot of money and effort into their development, and is even building a giant datacenter in Louisiana to power its AI efforts. Unlike AI models released by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, Meta’s Llama series of models are partially open-source, and allow anyone to edit them and make their own versions. Like with other models, Llama can be used to write code, and its capabilities have been improving over the last couple of years.
AI models in general have been getting really good at coding tasks. On Competition Code, OpenAI’s o3 model achieved an ELO of 2727 and a rank of 175, implying it was better than all but 174 human coders on the planet. And these AI systems are already being deployed at scale — Salesforce recently said it wouldn’t hire any more software engineers in AI because it’s seeing a 30 percent gain in productivity from using AI with its existing engineers, and Klarna has said that it doesn’t need to hire humans any more. And with even cutting-edge tech companies like Meta saying that AI will soon be as good as a mid-level engineer, it appear that AI is poised to disrupt a significant portion of AI jobs in the not too distant future.