SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Why OpenAI’s Codex Won’t Replace Coders:
This summer, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI released Codex, a new system that automatically writes software code using only simple prompts written in plain language. Codex is based on GPT-3, a revolutionary deep learning platform that OpenAI trained on nearly all publicly available written text on the Internet through 2019.
As an early Beta tester, I've had extensive opportunities to put both GPT-3 and Codex through their paces. The most frequent question I'm asked about Codex is "Will this replace human programmers?" With world powers like the United States investing billions into training new software developers, it's natural to worry that all the effort and money could be for naught.
If you're a software developer yourself—or your company has spent tons of money hiring them—you can breathe easy. Codex won't replace human developers any time soon, though it may make them far more powerful, efficient, and focused.
Why isn't Codex an existential threat to human developers? Years ago, I worked with a high-level (and highly compensated) data scientist and software developer from a major American consulting firm on a government database project. Our task was to understand how a state agency was using its database to assign grants to organizations, and then to advise the agency on how to improve the database.
[...] He later explained to me that actually writing code and running analyses occupies about 1 percent of his time. The remainder is spent working with clients to understand their problems, determining the right software and mathematical models to use, gathering and cleaning the actual data, and presenting results. In most cases, the coding and math itself is a tiny, almost rote, part of the software development process.
[...] The day when a non-coder can sit down with Codex, write up a spec sheet, and crank out a working piece of software is still far away.
[...] Systems like Codex may fail when they're pitted against a skilled human developer. But as Codex and its ilk improve, humans who transform themselves into centaurs by combining their skills with advanced AI are likely to become a powerful—and perhaps unstoppable—technological force.
So what do you people think, will Codex live up to it's hype or is this another technology that is perpetually 20 years away !!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01 2021, @08:10AM
It makes the problem worse in the long run. The real solution is to either readjust the tuner or fix the cracked joint.