Matt Welsh, a former professor of computer science at Harvard and founder of Fixie.ai, believes that large language models like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot represent the beginning of the end of programming. Welsh argues that programming languages are too complex, and no amount of improvement will make them simple. He thinks there will have to be a quantum shift to instruct computers, similar to the democratization of reading. Anyone will be able to instruct machines with AI models, and it will benefit many who currently lack access to computing due to the high skill level required. Welsh believes that computer science has always been about humans turning problems into instructions for machines, and with larger AI models, the computational core is no longer an x86 CPU running machine instructions. Instead, AI models can solve problems and work in ways that are similar to humans.
Source: The New Stack