It makes me wonder whether a six-week crash coding course is worth it. That, coupled with an AI multiplier, could make me dangerous.
The logic is simple enough. Six weeks won’t make anyone a software engineer. But the multiplier changes what six weeks buys. Most of what a beginner learns in six weeks is vocabulary — enough to describe a thing precisely and to know when a description has come back wrong. A person who can read code and recognize when the machine has got it wrong has most of what they need, because the machine now does the typing.
Meanwhile, the ground is moving under everyone. Not metaphorically. I just tried to register for a waitlist and the site is crashing.
It’s been that kind of week. Yesterday Google announced Bard, “an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA,” and said it was opening it to trusted testers “ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.” Today Microsoft unveiled the new Bing, “running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search,” in limited preview, with everyone else invited to “sign up for the waitlist.” If a sign-up page somewhere buckled under the whole internet arriving at once, that would be the least surprising thing to happen this week.
Wow. I may have to change course on some of my own AI projects — that was fast. Anyone building on the assumption that the giants would be slow has just been corrected.
The arithmetic that matters to me doesn’t change with the news, though. Substantial reductions in operational costs, or significant improvement to the value offered, equals EBITDA growth by multiples. Either one, on its own, is the whole game for a business. AI is the rare tool that promises both at once — cheaper to run and better to buy.
