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Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

businessinsider.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#71

Post by kajumix »

tombert wrote: post #15

https://archive.is/SHoY9 Maybe. It's certainly possible that this is the case, but I'm hesitant to believe anything Zuckerberg says during a hype-train, especially when saying that has a non-zero chance of boosting the stock. But let's suppose that this is true, I don't think it necessarily implies that fewer engineers are actually hired. It could be that this "AI mid-level" engineer frees up resources for the remain…

Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#72

Post by kajumix »

tombert wrote: post #15

https://archive.is/SHoY9 Maybe. It's certainly possible that this is the case, but I'm hesitant to believe anything Zuckerberg says during a hype-train, especially when saying that has a non-zero chance of boosting the stock. But let's suppose that this is true, I don't think it necessarily implies that fewer engineers are actually hired. It could be that this "AI mid-level" engineer frees up resources for the remain…

Also, I'd expect he cares very little about the stock price. He turned down Yahoo's offer when it must have seemed so lucrative

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#73

Post by bsaul »

janice1999 wrote: post #52
bsaul wrote: post #38

i'm quite surprised by the level of skepticism in this thread. I've been developping my website + webservice + db only using cursor "composer" mode, not typing a single line of code, and i'm already with something fully functional. I am voluntarely refraining from fixing the bugs myself by digging into the code, just to see how far someone with 0 coding skill can go. And this answer is : as far as a junior / midlevel…

Could someone with "0 coding skill" really compose the prompts in the first place? You need to understand the problem space, the right terminology and visualise a general architecture/structure for the solution. These things might be obvious to you and me but take someone from a different field and it would be the same as handing me the controls to a medical robot and telling me to start pushing buttons.

this seems like a very very minor thing compared to correctly understanding how a bug in a screen showing "unauthorized access" on the react frontend project, is in fact triggered by a wrong configuration in a "authorization service" in a file located completely elsewhere, due to a serialization issue, etc..

"visualizing a general architecture" is piece of cake compared to the mental model one need to understand a full stack react / express / sqlite / typescript stack with sufficient details to be able to debug obscure error code.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#74

Post by kajumix »

janice1999 wrote: post #52
bsaul wrote: post #38

i'm quite surprised by the level of skepticism in this thread. I've been developping my website + webservice + db only using cursor "composer" mode, not typing a single line of code, and i'm already with something fully functional. I am voluntarely refraining from fixing the bugs myself by digging into the code, just to see how far someone with 0 coding skill can go. And this answer is : as far as a junior / midlevel…

Could someone with "0 coding skill" really compose the prompts in the first place? You need to understand the problem space, the right terminology and visualise a general architecture/structure for the solution. These things might be obvious to you and me but take someone from a different field and it would be the same as handing me the controls to a medical robot and telling me to start pushing buttons.

Do you realize most enterprise coders are writing just simple CRUD applications?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#75

Post by tombert »

kajumix wrote: post #71
tombert wrote: post #15

https://archive.is/SHoY9 Maybe. It's certainly possible that this is the case, but I'm hesitant to believe anything Zuckerberg says during a hype-train, especially when saying that has a non-zero chance of boosting the stock. But let's suppose that this is true, I don't think it necessarily implies that fewer engineers are actually hired. It could be that this "AI mid-level" engineer frees up resources for the remain…

Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.

Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective.

I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.

It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#76

Post by sundaeofshock »

tombert wrote: post #61
throwaway48476 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found the fabled solution for measuring programmer productivity?

No, but I do feel like if every programmer were to complain that all they do is babysit AI code, and if we see that most of their commits are fixing mistakes of AI code (e.g. wrapping stuff with null checks or something), eventually management would listen.

Management will not listen as long as the company’s future success is at least partially based on the success of their AI developer initiative.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#77

Post by myth_drannon »

sjtgraham wrote: post #18
myth_drannon wrote: post #7

That is the same person who renamed his company to Meta and went all in into the metaverse and how we all be working in the metaverse. The guy got lucky once, that's all, he is not the modern Oracle.

I say this half-jokingly, but only half: Zuck's on TRT now and thinking much more clearly.

Isn't it the opposite? Testosterone causes high-risk behaviour.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#78

Post by kajumix »

tombert wrote: post #75
kajumix wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.

Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective. I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so go…

Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#79

Post by tombert »

kajumix wrote: post #78
tombert wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective. I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so go…

Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.

I don't see how any of that proves that founder CEOs don't care about stock price. Just because they don't take the first easy-out doesn't imply that they're not susceptible to doing things to try and drum up investor hype. I own stock in Apple but I don't panic-sell every single time that AAPL drops in price.

VR is neat but the "metaverse" suggests a lot more, which is why I called it out and not VR.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg says AI could soon do the work of Meta's midlevel engineers

#80

Post by akmarinov »

He’s missing the bigger story here.

B2B SaaS platforms like Salesforce/CRMs, etc are dead.

Let’s say you’re a big company able to afford quite a bit of mid level AI engineers - why bother paying millions to Salesforce, when you can direct your 24/7 mid engineers to just replicate the Salesforce offering?

Code quality doesn’t matter, it can be copy paste after copy paste, as long as the AI devs manage it.

The death of these types of companies are going to erase billions in the stock market.

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