[ilaksh]

Good point to a degree, but it applies to all work, not just software engineering, and even before they get into the workforce. Young people are not going to have any depth of skills or knowledge if they literally just act as a go-between for AI to do everything.

Maybe they become experts in wiring up AI and robotics?

But 5 years out, we might be into a new compute-in-memory paradigm. And we may have exceeded the complexity of the human brain with models greater than 100 trillion parameters.

We already see performance that is superhuman in task specific ways with 1-10 trillion parameters models.

In under 5 years, most small and many medium business will be handled directly by AI agents. You won't even necessarily know what kind of software they are running. For small-medium business, it may have very little or no code and just be a semi-structured database that is neutrally rendered into any needed form on-the-fly.

[suzzer99]

I feel like this is very possible eventually, but under 5 years seems unrealistic to me. The compute power is already running into limits. And a few more major problems need to be solved before agents can have that kind of autonomy to create software from scratch and run entire businesses.

[ilaksh]

Given the intense pressure to find more efficiency, 5 years is probably enough to see deployment of radical new compute-in-memory paradigms such as nitrides-based ferroelectric devices that have a few orders of magnitude more efficiency.

I think the biggest problem is jagged intelligence which I would bet would be solved largely with bigger models, which comes back to rapidly evolving hardware paradigms.