Don’t learn to code: Nvidia’s founder Jensen Huang advises a different career path::Don’t learn to code advises Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Thanks to AI everybody will soon become a capable programmer simply using human language.

  • kescusay@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I really don’t see it.

    Think about a modern application. Think about the file structure, how the individual sources interrelate, how non-code assets are stored, how applications are deployed, and all the other bits and pieces that go into an application. An AI can’t know any of that without being trained - by a human - on the specifics of that application’s needs.

    I use Copilot for my job. It’s very nice, and makes my job easier. And if my boss fired me and the rest of the team and tried to do it himself, the application would be down in a day, then irrevocably destroyed in a week. Then he’d be fired, we’d be rehired, and we - unlike my now-former boss - would know things like how to revert the changes he made when he broke everything while trying to make Copilot create a whole new feature for the application.

    AI code generation is pretty cool, but without the capacity to know what code actually should be generated, it’s useless.

    • paf0@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s just going to create a summary story about the code base and reference that story as it implements features, not that different that a human. It’s not necessarily something it can do now but it will come. Developers are not special, and I was never talking about Copilot.

      • kescusay@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I don’t think most people grok just how hard implementing that kind of joined-up thinking and metacognition is.

        You’re right, developers aren’t special, except in those ways all humans are, but we’re a very long way indeed from being able to simulate them in AI - especially in large language models. Humans automatically engage in joined-up thinking, second-order logic, and so on, without having to consciously try. Those are all things a large language model literally can’t do.

        It doesn’t know anything. It can’t conceptualize a “summary story,” or understand parts that it might get wrong in such a story. It’s glorified autocomplete.

        And that can be extraordinarily useful, but only if we’re honest with ourselves about what it is and is not capable of.

        Companies that decide to replace their developers with one guy using ChatGPT or Gemini or something will fail, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future.

        • paf0@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Try for a second to think beyond what they’re able to do now and think about the future. Also, educate yourself on Autogen and CrewAI, you actually haven’t addressed anything I said because you’re too busy pontificating.