r/webdev • u/Proud-Confidence7290 • Nov 26 '23

Question Will AI decrease demand and salaries?

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?

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274

u/thedeuceisloose Nov 26 '23

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

27

u/YoyoyoyoMrWhite Nov 26 '23

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

22

u/DisneyLegalTeam full-stack Nov 26 '23

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.

0

u/Digitalburn Nov 26 '23

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.

-10

u/Pelopida92 Nov 26 '23

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.

5

u/lampstax Nov 26 '23

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

1

u/Blazing1 Nov 28 '23

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.