AI will surpass humans in coding this year itself, but jobs not entirely at risk: OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil

OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become better than humans at competitive coding by the end of this year.

“At the rate we’re going, I would be surprised if it’s 2027,” Weil told Varun Mayya and Tanmay Bhat on their YouTube show Overpowered, since he feels that it’s going to be much sooner.

This was primarily because of how rapidly OpenAI’s models are advancing. He took the example of the upcoming GPT-03, which he described as the 175th best competitive coder in the world.

“Imagine all the things that you can do if you don’t need to be an engineer to create software,” he said. “AI passing humans at software is way more important than AI passing humans at chess, because with software, you can create anything you want.”

However, Weil also believes that AI will not replace humans entirely, but will complement every job. “You’re going to be using it day in and day out to augment yourself in your job,” he said. “People are going to increasingly be sort of managers of these AI employees that will do a lot of the basic work for them.”

Weil is not alone in these beliefs. Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding members of Artificial Intelligence (AI) giant OpenAI had said in 2023 that “the hottest new programming language is English” since users can simply ask AI to do their coding for them.

Due to this, learning to manually code from the ground up can become redundant due to its time-consuming nature and the fact that AI can even make rectifications with just prompts.

“There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” a report by The Guardian quoted Karpathy as having said. “It’s possible because the LLMs are getting too good.”