Machines, Learning, and Machine Learning

Absolutely great talk from the latest NDC Porto - Machines, Learning, and Machine Learning by Dylan Beattie. The author reflects about current state of AI and try to answer the most important question - if AI replaces software developers in the nearest future?😱

Some interesting points from the talk:
🔸 Software is predictable, the reality is not. GenAI is not deterministic by its nature.
🔸 AI doesn't really `think`. It predicts the most suitable tokens according to the provided context. But a lot of people who doesn't really understand how it works tends to think that current AI has some intellect (but it doesn't).
🔸 Vibe coding has no sense without human in the middle. Generated code requires review and the person who will take the responsibility of the end result.
🔸 Companies that invest to GenAI are interested to create addiction to AI tools. As you don't know if your prompt produce expected results, you will to try more and more times to get what you want. It's very similar to the slot machine: sometimes you succeed, sometimes not.
🔸 The less someone understands how AI works, the more convinced they are that it will replace software engineers soon. Right now, it's mostly managers and journalists who talk about that.

The overall idea is that current generation of AI tools can be helpful as assistants and copilots, but they can't replace the real human (at least for software development 😉).

#ai #engineering