I think this has been said pretty much every decade since computers were invented. At one point, for instance, they said that Object Oriented Programming would kill "coding" because people with limited training, or businesspeople, would just link reusable components and voila, here is your airline reservation system.
It's true. Nobody writes (assembly) code anymore; machines do all that work now.
(For that matter, having spent a lot of my career working on compilers, it's notable that nobody really writes code generators anymore, either! It's all been done already.)
When I started coding, memory management was all basically manual, but machines do all that work now.
Yes, coding is a dying profession - but it always has been, and a new profession of coding is perpetually being born atop the old abstractions, as the work continues; because the work is not really about the details of the machines, except incidentally, but about understanding the problems and the needs well enough to express them in whatever the current language of the machines happens to be.
Obviously he has a huge incentive to publicly proclaim that the ceiling of AI is limitless. But does anyone think he actually believes this?
When your business is about selling shovels to gold diggers, there is no way you can admit that there is no gold out there.
AI rescued Nvidia when nobody was buying their shovels for digging crypto gold. If it wasn’t for ChatGPT, Nvidia story would have been very different right now. He is probably just hoping that this dream never ends. Otherwise there’s no way to justify the current valuation in the long term.
> The time otherwise spent learning to code should instead be invested in expertise in industries such as farming, biology, manufacturing and education
i.e. absolutely brutal physical labor jobs where labor is de facto expendable and wealth inequality runs rampant.
He might as well have said "If you can't become a doctor or lawyer or don't have a PhD in CS or Math and can't work for me, prepare to work the fields and make me richer."
i'm not sure if he meant that but that's what i took from this statement. and i can absolutely see that happening as AI "eats the world", as it were.
LLMs can help with programming. But you cannot just copy/paste the code from LLMs and push to production. You need to understand the code that LLMs are producing otherwise soon or later you will get in trouble.
As a developer, I agree with this. Huang may play a marketing game here, but he’s right. “Coding” isn’t something humanity needs to do, because coding in textbooks and coding in reality are two different things. Our IRL coding is a bunch of self-inflicted and cheered complexity and an artificial barrier that secures the jobs. AI has a very good potential to distill coding back to the essence and then some more. Not the current AI, but 2024 isn’t the last year of humanity either. So coding isn’t dying, but coding as we know it should die anyway. Should have, long ago, but it’s so compelling to just stay in a comfort zone of being a software developer. He claims everyone will be a coder, and that I find realistic. Of course people incapable of even easiest levels of “STEM” will exist, but the bar will lower dramatically.
"Commercial trucking is a dying profession." -some guy from 10 years ago
Of course today there are more commercial truckers than ever. So many people seem to forget that not only are sigmoid curves [1] a thing, but literally every single neural network advance to date has ended up being on one. That said, I imagine his comment is more about trying to add fuel to the LLM frenzy than a necessarily sincerely held belief - more hype is probably just an effort to try to make NVID go up.
No way any regulated industry is going to just trust some AI to write the code.
Imagine trying to get a medical device through FDA approval with firmware written by a bot.
Notice he did not say anything about computer science or the principles. You might not need to type Python or Java, but you still need to understand the architecture, the implications of state management, eventual consistency, etc. etc. etc. So yes typing gets easier, but instead of python, we’ll be typing various prompts, aka prompt engineering. We rarely resort to bytecode these days as well. The abstraction increases, but the principles are still needed.
I wonder if one day we’ll have the Toyota factory level need for manual work to train the next set of senior leaders: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/07/business/gods-e...
The reason their company is worth 2 trillion dollar is because of the programmers who wrote cuda.
I do not think it's ever going to become that we code with AI. I just don't see how using black box to produce code is ever going to work out well, and in fact it would be pretty dangerous as you would let essentially the biggest companies that have the cash to actually train the big models to control what goes in your code. And if we think of the future where we want kids to only learn AI programming, they won't actually know what the resulting code does.
Human beings don't generally want to be programmers. They have other things to do with their time. I've never understood this obsession with getting non-technical people into programming with some new development methodology or programming language.
Programming isn't for everyone. A programming language is a tool to solve an automation problems. And tons of people just aren't interesting in solving automation problems. You can make the language as non-computer-y as you want. It won't be able to remove the stuff that makes automation difficult -- edge cases, repeatability, maintenance, etc.
What AI could replace are all the frankly hare-brained attempts at "natural language" programming languages intended to make programming appealing to people who probably would never find it appealing. So basically, Shortcuts and AppleScript on steroids. That's a great use for AI. But it does not represent a threat to the employment security of the guy who maintains a kernel scheduler, VM subsystem, etc.
Transcription: please don't sell your stocks
When I see AI take an large existing legacy codebase and rewrite it perfectly then I will believe that
Learn to code^H^H^H^Hfarm. - Jensen Huang
At least he's not telling us to learn coal mining, I guess.
AI still has poor performance when "thinking outside the box".
When AI is able to think creative, novel thoughts then I admit progamming will be a thing of past.
But he should remember that, when AI can think creatively, so will CEOs be a thing of the past.
Nvidia is grooming the next generation of script kiddies.
Its not because most of the time spent is not coding. It is figuring out what the imprecise feature request is really about, how to integrate with this legacy system that Jeff maintains on the other side of the country, convince your boss to not spend money on this useless new AI shit thing, etc, etc.
AI will never fall in love and make babies so it is not a self perpetuating species
Dying "profession". Growing hobby.
He is right, but, in that sense, every job done in front of a computer is a dying profession, because by the time coding is automated so will every other computer based office job.
However, be wary of getting AI to write your code too soon. In its current state you will save several hours of writing code, only to spend hours more on maintenance. Maintaining code is much harder than writing it. You won't have a human to ask "What was the intention behind X weird pattern".
Capitalism, if it survives, will be forced to change. Or it will end up eating its own head off.
Let him cook
Prove it.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-ceo-the-metaverse-will...
> the economy of the virtual world will be much, much bigger than the economy of the physical world. You’re going to have more cars built and designed in virtual worlds, you’ll have more buildings, more roads, more houses — more hats, more bags, more jackets.
> "It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence."
The Nvidia CEO doesn't understand what programming is.
[dead]
Hey chat-gpt, create open-source Nvidia drivers