The world’s first AI programmer is born. Will human programmers be unemployed?
Recently, the world’s first AI programmer, Devin, was born. He claims to be able to learn new technologies independently and fix bugs by himself. He has even successfully passed an interview with an AI company. The news shocked the entire technology circle as soon as it came out. Many practitioners left messages on social media saying they were worried that AI programmer skills like Devin might cost them their jobs.
What new changes will AI programmers bring to the entire industry? Will the future era of artificial intelligence eliminate all human programmers?
The world’s first AI software engineer DIVIN is born
Recently, Cognition, a start-up company that was established less than two months ago but has ten talented engineers, launched the world’s first AI software engineer named Devin. The R&D team just released a demonstration video on social media, which attracted industry attention. It has attracted great attention from many programmers.
Users only need to enter a command into the interface, and Devin can handle the entire development project end-to-end.
According to reports, a benchmark test called SWE-bench can solve 13.86% of the problems without human help. In contrast, GPT-4 can only handle 1.74% of the problems, and all require human prompts to tell which files to process.
Devin is not currently open for use. Participants must fill out a form and submit information to the R&D team to apply for a spot in the internal beta. Users commented that this closed beta was a very wonderful experience.
According to the video released, the professionals who participated in the test gave positive comments to Devin.
Wu Shenkuo, deputy director of the Research Center of the Internet Society of China, said that the most important breakthrough in the world’s first AI engineer is the improvement of self-learning ability, especially for different programming languages, the independent learning method is more prominent.
Divine Raised, widely discussed in the industry
Although the R&D team stated that Devin’s mission is to help humans program and allow programmers to solve more difficult and interesting problems, and is not meant to replace programmers, it still triggered extensive discussions on whether programmers are needed in the future AI era.
Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, has previously stated that there will be no such profession as “programmer” in the future. “Everyone can have the ability of a programmer. There will only be two programming languages left in the future, one is called English and the other is called Chinese.”
Zhou Hongyi, founder of 360 Group, gave a different view. He believed that the era of artificial intelligence would require more programmers. “I still believe that excellent engineers and programming talents cannot be replaced.”
Wu Shenkuo believes that after the popularization of AI applications in the future, the industry structure may change to a certain extent, but creative human programmers are still indispensable. Artificial intelligence will not be programmed to automatically generate the same emotional factors and value judgments as humans.
Artificial intelligence is divided into three stages, weak artificial intelligence, general artificial intelligence, and strong artificial intelligence. According to Zhu Rongsheng, a special expert at the Strategy and Security Research Center of Tsinghua University, new technology often triggers people’s expectations for the future. Still, at the moment, this AI software engineer has not undergone enough tests. How to make the program meet the needs of programmers and customers requires people to play a big role in it. “The programming industry may be impacted to some extent in the future, but people’s role in this is indispensable.”