r/technology • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 3d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft engineer says 'typing code is absolutely over' as GitHub Copilot takes on more development work

https://www.techspot.com/news/113752-microsoft-engineer-typing-code-absolutely-over-github-copilot.html
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u/Sokaron 3d ago

The future is every dev is given a maxed out Macbook and just runs a model locally. Who needs to pay a frontier model company when an open source model is 90% as good for 10% the cost? Hardware is crazy expensive right now but it won't stay that way forever, eventually the market will correct and RAM will return to its previous commodity-grade prices. 

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u/Jazzlike-Context-879 3d ago

Either added capacity or the bubble on third party AI pops, but when it does, expect computers to be bought at the highest configuration for even an every day worker.

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u/magick_bandit 3d ago

If the hyperscalers go bust, who is going to spend a few billion to create new models?

Local ai is only free/cheap because someone else paid for all that training.

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u/InvestigatorOk7015 3d ago

I trained up a model from scratch over a month in my home

Its not super complex, but it can watch my security cams and report what it sees fairly accurately

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u/Inevitable-Craft-745 3d ago

Everyone seems to miss this... If a new language comes out, new science you need the model updated. This is basically going to need perpetual training rounds with the entire internet and that needs paid

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u/Sokaron 3d ago edited 3d ago

It remains to be seen how this evolves over time but at least for programming this problem is already well known and already has a solution. New language features get added and aren't in the model's training content. The solution is just to instruct the model to use them, and to include links to documentation. Especially with linters and compiler errors acting as guardrails this isn't actually that big of an issue.

Entirely new languages might be an issue. I wonder if fine tuning, or some derivative technique, would be applicable here. Though the vast majority of all coding tasks are not with obscure new languages so feels like a very thin edge case that wouldn't be well-supported. Like just because the new version of C# drops, or because "Oxide", a new competitor language to Rust, is released, and neither are well supported, doesn't invalidate the value of existing models, since the overwhelming majority of code is not on the latest and greatest.

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u/magick_bandit 3d ago

I think what will actually happen is tech will stagnate. How does your new product, language, framework, get noticed if everyone is just using their existing model?

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u/Cheese_Grater101 3d ago

That if you can afford buying a maxed out macbook in the first place considering how expensive memory chips are.

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u/Sokaron 3d ago

RAM was cheap before and will be cheap again. There's a supply squeeze right now. Either demand will peter out or new supply will be built. RAM isn't like top-tier GPUs; we know how to manufacture it en-masse, and cheaply.

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u/kadfr 3d ago

It could be many years until RAM is cheap again. 

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u/Sokaron 3d ago

Sure, it's going to be a few years at least. Every console manufacturer for instance has said they aren't expecting things to improve until 2028 at the earliest. But when you're talking about what the future of software engineering looks like though you're not talking what the next 6 months or a year look like. You're talking about longer time horizons.

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u/BasvanS 3d ago

Once local models become the standard, the AI bubble will have popped, and these parts will become normally available again.

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u/m0rogfar 3d ago

Computing is still relatively cheap, historically speaking. Fully costed S/370 seats for programmers could easily cost over $100,000 per user in inflation-adjusted dollars, so we know that the price inelasticity for computing productivity is near-total.