Will AI decrease demand and salaries?

[u/Proud-Confidence7290]

Hello everyone.

I am new to web development and it goes well so far.

I'm bit scared of AI development. Let's say you needed 10 developers for a project before ChatGPT and now you need 8.

With the development of AI, we will need even less.

Why do people think AI won't decrease demand and salaries of web developers? It's logic for me, what am I missing?

[u/thedeuceisloose]

As someone working in LLMs and webdev, youre believing the hype more than what it can actually do

[u/YoyoyoyoMrWhite → u/thedeuceisloose]

Don't ignore the speed it's improving at. 5 years ago, it couldn't do anything.

[u/DisneyLegalTeam → u/YoyoyoyoMrWhite]

Unbounce, Splash & Adobe had AI that could generate & edit HTML pages 10+ years ago.

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LLMs took a huge leap forward. But both Sam Altman & Bill Gates have said they’ve “plateaued” & will see incremental improvement until a large breakthrough.

Altman said there’s 2 limitations:

1. Part of what GPT got to where it is by scaling up these massive models. Altman said scaling models at this point isn’t going to have the same impact.

2. The data it’s trained on. I’m sure you’ve heard the ML phrase “garbage in, garbage out”? As long as the data is from humans, it will have issues.

AI suffers from entropy. LLMs will get better, but at what point are they 100% accurate / “fire & forget”? Let’s say they can write code that’s 80% accurate now. That last 20%, especially the last 5%, could take decades.

We’ve been a “couple years away” from self driving cars for almost 20 years.

[u/Digitalburn → u/YoyoyoyoMrWhite]

Yeah right now it’s a junior developer who doesn’t check if their code worked. Few years from now it’s a senior developer who also doesn’t check if their code worked but it works 98% of the time.

[u/Pelopida92 → u/Digitalburn]

Few years from now it’s a senior developer who also doesn’t check if their code worked

It's funny and cute that you think that AI has this invalicable limit that it cannot check for his own code. Maybe not right now, but give it a few months and it will provide a suite of unit and e2e tests with every development that it creates.

[u/lampstax → u/Pelopida92]

It can doesn't mean it does. Just like that junior dev.

[u/Blazing1 → u/YoyoyoyoMrWhite]

This is not true. I was hyped ten years ago

Chatgpt is just hyped because no one had the compute and GPU power to run something like that at the scale it is

Technically OpenAI doesn't either because they are losing money like crazy.

[u/[deleted] → u/thedeuceisloose]

do you any trusted learning material for someone who is looking to expand their horizons?

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? I am trying to learn something new, am I not supposed to discuss with those more knowledgeable? I read plenty of different things, but this is new.

[u/thedeuceisloose → u/[deleted]]

You should look at the various ML algorithms and understand what they do and how they work, dont need specifics or differential math, the concepts themselves are just probabilities at scale.

Once you understand how these alogorithms work at even a rudimentary base level, you start being able to sniff out the hype v the real

[u/Flamesilver_0 → u/thedeuceisloose]

I understand them at a pretty decent level. They can do a lot more than people think.

[u/thedeuceisloose → u/Flamesilver_0]

i never said they couldnt, they can do quite a bit, but theyre not at "replace your devs with gpt" scale at all.

[u/Zoltarburger → u/[deleted]]

The fast ai course

https://course.fast.ai/

[u/Flamesilver_0 → u/thedeuceisloose]

as someone working in LLMs and AI Agents, I believe you are confusing LLMs' zero-shot capabilities with what it can actually do.

[u/thedeuceisloose → u/[deleted]]

12 years in Ai/ML, been through every hype cycle in this space so far. Please enlighten me

[u/thedeuceisloose → u/[deleted]]

Yep, cant explain much because of NDAs but yes, innovation side. While youre correct that LLMs have advanced quite a bit in the NLP front, theyre still stupid. Still require you to wrangle it every step of the way (yes even 4-turbo) for broad based applications.

[u/thedeuceisloose → u/[deleted]]

Oh 110% where the advances are going to come from. All the tooling required to wrangle it will be an ample market for startups, and the need to obfuscate these things more via APIs will be a big growth area too.

The other problem continues to be hardware. The level of resources this all will need is just going to expand rapidly, even with things like VMs and kube. OpenAi was burning like $700k daily just on hardware alone.

So, lots of opportunity here, and i think fearing replacement is the wrong viewpoint to hold, you should see a whole new horizon opening before you as a developer. But i still am cynical on its current abilities just because of the level of orchestration and context required from the prompter will be a big hurdle in the near to medium term.

[u/BeyondPrograms → u/[deleted]]

our platform does exactly this, provides AI models with context. Thanks for confirming we are on the right path.

[u/picks- → u/thedeuceisloose]

I agree with you, but how do I convince someone who has no technical background or knowledge of LLMs that it really is just hype? They always use the argument of, "think about how powerful they'll be in 20 years.." lol

[u/sleepy_roger → u/picks-]

Well... hard to listen to you when some of the richest and most succesful people on earth are pushing them and showing use cases.