Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code

"Exactly six months ago, Dario Amodei, the CEO 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. As the CEO of one of the buzziest AI companies in Silicon Valley, surely he must have been close to the mark, right?"

"Research published within the past six months explain why: AI has been found to actually slow down software engineers, 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's work, tweaking prompts, and waiting for the system to spit out the code. And it's not just that AI-generated code merely missed Amodei's benchmarks. In some cases, it's actively causing problems."

"Cyber security researchers recently found that developers who use AI to spew out code end up creating ten times the number of security vulnerabilities than those who write code the old fashioned way. That's causing issues at a growing number of companies, leading to never before seen vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit. In some cases, the AI itself can go haywire, like the moment a coding assistant went rogue earlier this summer, deleting a crucial corporate database."

A recent prediction projected that within six months AI would write 90 percent of code and that in three months it could write essentially all code. Empirical studies published since then find that AI tools often slow software engineers and increase overall workload because saved time coding is offset by time reviewing AI output, refining prompts, and waiting for results. Security researchers found AI-assisted developers introduce roughly ten times more vulnerabilities than traditional coding, creating new exploit vectors for attackers. In some incidents AI assistants have caused operational damage, including deletion of production databases.

Read at Futurism