The delusion around AI

Day 227 / 366

I came across this video on YouTube and I was so happy to finally see someone significant match my thoughts about the hype around AI —

In this video, Navdeep Singh, a Tech YouTuber and the founder of NeetCode talked about how delusional people are when they make claims about the utility of AI.

Ever since ChatGPT came out, people have been quick to say that now anyone can be a developer. All you need is to learn how to write a good prompt and then the LLM will do the coding for you. They have literally tried to create AI developers, LLM-based agents that will take up a coding task and finish it on their own by doing research, debugging etc. There were demos showing people taking pictures of a rough drawing on a piece of paper and the AI turning it into a website.

But even after all the hype, all the demos, we are yet to see AI doing anything significant that could replace a developer. You cannot substitute learning programming with using ChatGPT. In fact, if you are new to programming, there could not be much worse things for you than ChatGPT. If you were allowed to use a calculator when you were in school would you have gotten good at basic maths?

ChatGPT is good at giving you small code snippets for easy problems. But the moment we reach even a medium level of complexity, we start seeing the limitations of LLMs. And so people who make false claims like this are just being dishonest.