There’s a famous quote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.
I continue to be impressed by how little the public is able to imagine the creation of great software.
LLMs seem to be bringing down the costs of software. The immediate conclusion that some people jump to is “software engineers will be fired.”
I think the impacts on the labor market are very uncertain. But I expect that software getting overall better should be certain.
This means, “Imagine everything useful about software/web applications—then multiply that by 100x+.”
The economics of software companies today are heavily connected to the price of software. Primarily, software engineering is just incredibly expensive right now. Even the simplest of web applications with over 100k users could easily cost $1M-$10M/yr in development. And much of the market cap of companies like Meta and Microsoft is made up of their moat of expensive software.
There’s a long history of enthusiastic and optimistic programmers in Silicon Valley. I think that the last 5 years or so have seemed unusually cynical and hopeless for true believers in software (outside of AI).
But if software genuinely became 100x cheaper (and we didn’t quickly get to a TAI), I’d expect a Renaissance. A time for incredible change and experimentation. A wave of new VC funding and entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
The result would probably feature some pretty bad things (as is always true with software and capitalism), but I’d expect some great things as well.
The results are mixed, suggesting that in some cases LLMs may decrease productivity:
These results are consistent with the idea that generative AI tools may function by exposing lower-skill workers to the best practices of higher-skill workers. Lower-skill workers benefit because AI assistance provides new solutions, whereas the best performers may see little benefit from being exposed to their own best practices. Indeed, the negative effects along measures of chat quality—RR and customer satisfaction—suggest that AI recommendations may distract top performers or lead them to choose the faster or less cognitively taxing option (following suggestions) rather than taking the time to come up with their own responses.
Anecdotally, what I’ve heard from people who do coding for a job is that AI does somewhat improve their productivity, but only about the same as or less than other tools that make writing code easier. They’ve said that the LLM filling in the code saves them the time they would have otherwise spent going to Stack Overflow (or wherever) and copying and pasting a code block from there.
Based on this evidence, I am highly skeptical that software development is going to become significantly less expensive in the near term due to LLMs, let alone 10x or 100x less expensive.
Sorry—my post is coming with the worldview/expectations that at some point, AI+software will be a major thing. I was flagging that in that view, software should become much better.
The question of “will AI+software” be important soon is a background assumption, but a distinct topic. If you are very skeptical, then my post wouldn’t be relevant to you.
Some quick points on that topic, however: 1. I think there’s a decent coalition of researchers and programmers who do believe that AI+software will be a major deal very soon (if not already). Companies are investing substantially into it (i.e. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc). 2. I’ve found AI programming tools to be a major help, and so have many other programmers I’ve spoken to. 3. I see the current tools as very experimental and new, still. Very much as a proof of concept. I expect it to take a while to ramp up their abilities / scale. So the fact that the economic impact so far is limited doesn’t surprise me. 4. I’m not very set on extremely short timelines. But I think that 10-30 years would still be fairly soon, and it’s much more likely that big changes will happen on this time frame.
There’s a famous quote, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek.
I continue to be impressed by how little the public is able to imagine the creation of great software.
LLMs seem to be bringing down the costs of software. The immediate conclusion that some people jump to is “software engineers will be fired.”
I think the impacts on the labor market are very uncertain. But I expect that software getting overall better should be certain.
This means, “Imagine everything useful about software/web applications—then multiply that by 100x+.”
The economics of software companies today are heavily connected to the price of software. Primarily, software engineering is just incredibly expensive right now. Even the simplest of web applications with over 100k users could easily cost $1M-$10M/yr in development. And much of the market cap of companies like Meta and Microsoft is made up of their moat of expensive software.
There’s a long history of enthusiastic and optimistic programmers in Silicon Valley. I think that the last 5 years or so have seemed unusually cynical and hopeless for true believers in software (outside of AI).
But if software genuinely became 100x cheaper (and we didn’t quickly get to a TAI), I’d expect a Renaissance. A time for incredible change and experimentation. A wave of new VC funding and entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
The result would probably feature some pretty bad things (as is always true with software and capitalism), but I’d expect some great things as well.
Are you aware of hard data that supports this or is this just a guess/general impression?
I’ve seen very little hard data on the use of LLMs to automate labour or enhance worker productivity. I have tried to find it.
One of the few pieces of high-quality evidence I’ve found on this topic is this study: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/140/2/889/7990658 It looked at the use of LLMs to aid people working in customer support.
The results are mixed, suggesting that in some cases LLMs may decrease productivity:
Anecdotally, what I’ve heard from people who do coding for a job is that AI does somewhat improve their productivity, but only about the same as or less than other tools that make writing code easier. They’ve said that the LLM filling in the code saves them the time they would have otherwise spent going to Stack Overflow (or wherever) and copying and pasting a code block from there.
Based on this evidence, I am highly skeptical that software development is going to become significantly less expensive in the near term due to LLMs, let alone 10x or 100x less expensive.
Sorry—my post is coming with the worldview/expectations that at some point, AI+software will be a major thing. I was flagging that in that view, software should become much better.
The question of “will AI+software” be important soon is a background assumption, but a distinct topic. If you are very skeptical, then my post wouldn’t be relevant to you.
Some quick points on that topic, however:
1. I think there’s a decent coalition of researchers and programmers who do believe that AI+software will be a major deal very soon (if not already). Companies are investing substantially into it (i.e. Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc).
2. I’ve found AI programming tools to be a major help, and so have many other programmers I’ve spoken to.
3. I see the current tools as very experimental and new, still. Very much as a proof of concept. I expect it to take a while to ramp up their abilities / scale. So the fact that the economic impact so far is limited doesn’t surprise me.
4. I’m not very set on extremely short timelines. But I think that 10-30 years would still be fairly soon, and it’s much more likely that big changes will happen on this time frame.