Source: Cailian Press
Image source: Generated by Wujie AI
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a recent hot topic in Silicon Valley, as it has captured almost all of our imagination.
However, there is still a lot of controversy over this new thing: big shots like Elon Musk and Sam Altman believe that achieving AGI is inevitable; while one of the fathers of machine learning, Yann LeCun, believes that "there is no such thing as AGI," and Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, describes the "suffocating enthusiasm for AGI" as a "misplaced religious impulse."
Regarding this hot topic, David Cahn, a partner at the well-known venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, wrote in an article that he believes AGI is indeed a path to the future, but given its uncertainty, there is actually another path that does not require technological leaps and is already underway.
In an article titled "The Next Billion Developers," the subtitle is quite eye-catching, called "The Developer Revolution Will Be as Important as the Artificial Intelligence Revolution."
The Next Billion Developers
As the population begins to grow exponentially and computers and networks become more widespread, there are more developers today than ever before.
This year, data released by GitHub, a software development platform owned by Microsoft, shows that the number of people engaged in software development worldwide has reached 100 million, an increase of 26% from last year, compared to only 24 million when this indicator was first reported in 2017.
Cahn pointed out, "We have three reasons to believe that the rapid growth in the number of developers will continue."
First, becoming a software developer is becoming easier and easier, and we hope this trend will continue. In the past decade, developer platforms have increased in power while reducing complexity. Therefore, a 12-year-old child can now build a web application in a few days, whereas a professional developer might have taken weeks in the past.
Second, the market continues to attract more and more young people to become software engineers. Currently, people are disproportionately learning to code. With more and more talent entering the field, the economic returns of software engineering seem to be expanding.
Third, artificial intelligence is an unexpected accelerator. Today, the AI assistant Copilot built into GitHub writes code for 46% of users; Zapier allows developers to build automation using text descriptions; Open Interpreter is transforming command lines into chat interfaces. And as artificial intelligence develops, we may eventually be able to program computers using natural language alone.
David Cahn pointed out that if 1 billion developers are introduced into software engineering, in terms of its economic impact, it can be comparable to AGI.
Software engineering is one of the most powerful tools invented by humans. If it can be more widely applied with the help and acceleration of artificial intelligence, it may lead to the automation of many non-technical industries, creating economic spillovers.
Today, these technologies are widely being applied in mining, robotics, construction, accounting, and law, among other fields. Traditional companies in mature industries are bringing in more and more software engineers to drive internal digitization, while newer startups are also leveraging software and artificial intelligence.
Cahn stated that the opportunity of 1 billion developers is not only to drive automation in the digital economy, but also to drive automation in the physical economy. "Unlike AGI, the promise of 1 billion developers is not to completely eliminate jobs, but to generate an increasingly greater impact using human resources."
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
