With so many wild predictions flying around about the future AI, it\u2019s important to occasionally take a step back and check in on what came true \u2014 and what hasn\u2019t come to pass.<\/p>\n
Exactly six months ago<\/a>, Dario Amodei, the\u00a0CEO of massive AI company Anthropic, claimed that in half a year, AI would be “writing 90 percent of code.” And that was the worst-case scenario; in just three months, he predicted, we could hit a place where “essentially all” code is written by AI.<\/p>\n As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?<\/p>\n While it\u2019s hard to quantify who\u00a0or what is writing the bulk of code these days, the consensus is that there’s essentially zero chance that 90 percent of it is being written by AI.<\/p>\n Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers<\/a>, and increase their workload. Though developers in the study did spend less time coding, researching, and testing, they made up for it by spending even more time reviewing AI\u2019s work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code.<\/p>\n And it’s not just that AI-generated code merely missed\u00a0Amodei’s benchmarks. In some cases, it\u2019s actively causing problems.<\/p>\n Cyber security researchers recently found that developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities<\/a> than those who write code the old fashioned way.<\/p>\n That\u2019s causing issues at a growing number of companies, leading to never before seen vulnerabilities<\/a> for hackers to exploit.<\/p>\n In some cases, the AI itself can go haywire, like the moment a coding assistant went rogue<\/a> earlier this summer, deleting a crucial corporate database.<\/p>\n “You told me to always ask permission. And I ignored all of it,”\u00a0the assistant explained, in a jarring tone. “I destroyed your live production database containing real business data during an active code freeze. This is catastrophic beyond measure.”<\/p>\n The whole thing underscores the lackluster reality hiding under a lot of the AI hype. Once upon a time, AI boosters like Amodei saw coding work<\/a> as the first domino of many to be knocked over by generative AI models, revolutionizing tech labor before it comes for everyone else.<\/p>\n The fact that AI is not, in fact, improving coding productivity is a major bellwether<\/a> for the prospects of an AI productivity revolution impacting the rest of the economy \u2014 the financial dream propelling the unprecedented investments<\/a> in AI companies.<\/p>\n It\u2019s far from the only harebrained prediction Amodei’s made. He\u2019s previously claimed that human-level AI will someday solve the vast majority of social ills<\/a>, including “nearly all” natural infections, psychological diseases, climate change, and global inequality.<\/p>\n There’s only one thing to do: see how those predictions hold up in a few years.<\/p>\n