Software (3.0) will eat the world?

In a refreshing break from the AI hype, Andrej Karpathy has a great talk on youtube that he gave to Y combinator AI Startup School

Among the highlights (for me):

If writing traditional programs using IDE’s with bespoke code by software engineers was Software 1.0, he frames two additional phases of software development. Software 2.0 was the broad dissemination and use of neural networks, such as is used in computer vision, classifiers, and networks trained through supervised learning. Software 3.0, which we are in now, is generative AI with natural language understanding. Andrej does not think we are at a time in which the software engineer is obsolete. LLMs are too unreliable since they are non deterministic, don’t have guardrails, and don’t actually think. But what they can be is a component of larger systems, in which things that were once hard and required hand coding are increasingly being done by the AI tools. Larger and larger sections of codebases will be able to be move into a larger AI based system (and software 3.0 will eat older code bases).

Large LLM vendors can be thought of as utilities (ubiquitous, and an enabler of other tools; valued for their stability and up time; paid for by usage that is metered), fabs (manufacturers of commodities that are built into tools that require ongoing capital expense and extensive R&D), or operating systems(software ecosystems for developers to built on top of, some switching costs to change).
AI as a product is still not understood. Human in the loop systems will produce the most value as these can manage the AI tools and impose guardrails on the systems. The best UIs still remain to be built.

I found the talk very pragmatic and a nice counterpoint to artificial superintelligence hype.

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