Dario Amodei, CEO of the California-based AI company Anthropic, made a bold prediction about the future of software engineering, suggesting that AI models could soon take over most, if not all, tasks currently performed by software engineers. He estimated that this shift could happen within the next six to twelve months.
Engineers Already Abandoning Manual Coding
Amodei’s comments were made during a discussion with Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday.
Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei:
"we might be 6-12 months away from models doing all of what software engineers do end-to-end"
We're approaching a feedback loop where AI builds better AI
But the loop isn't fully closed yet, chip manufacturing and training time still limit speed pic.twitter.com/CZMlbxqS66
When asked about the timeline for this shift, Amodei noted that engineers at Anthropic have already stopped writing code manually.
He said, “We are now in terms of the models that write code. I have engineers within Anthropic who say, I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code. I edit it. I do the things around it. I think we might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what we do end to end.”
Self-Improvement Loop Accelerates Development
Amodei, who is considered the principal leader and guiding force behind the development of the Claude family of AI models, explained that the mechanism involves AI models proficient at coding and AI research creating next-generation models, establishing an acceleration loop.
“It’s a question of how fast does that loop close,” he said, acknowledging constraints including chip manufacturing and training time limit automation speed.
AI Poised To Automate Jobs
Amodei’s prediction about the automation of software engineering tasks aligns with the rapid advancements in AI and automation technologies.
The trend has also raised concerns for many, with AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, aka the "Godfather of AI,’ warning that AI could replace millions of jobs by 2026.
Photo courtesy: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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