Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

>OpenAI plans to loose $5 billion this year

Let that sink in for anyone that has incorporated Chatgpt in their work routines to the point their normal skills start to atrophy. Imagine in 2 years time OpenAI goes bust and MS gets all the IP. Now you can't really do your work without ChatGPT, but it cost has been brought up to how much it really costs to run. Maybe $2k per month per person? And you get about 1h of use per day for the money too...

I've been saying for ages, being a luditite and abstaining from using AI is not the answer (no one is tiling the fields with oxen anymore either). But it is crucial to at the very least retain 50% of capability hosted models like Chatgpt offer locally.

$2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll replace.

Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty much told us to use AI or get fired

It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard.

Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue.

Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping block, then more experienced developers will be next. Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-concept stage.

Unless I’ve missed some major development then I have to strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long.

99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets come in that say something like, “Users should be able to select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so long as they have the management role.”

That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React components, and even a few changes in a micro service that’s not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail over and over again because it’s not familiar with the APIs for our internal libraries and tools, etc.

AI is useful, but I don’t feel like we’re any closer to replacing software developers now than we were a few years ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.