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.