Tim Sweeney: belief

Transcript context

…Of course, there is a real human pain to layoffs and there’s a hype around AI and then companies might try to implement AI systems, and in so doing, layoff a bunch of folks and the pain that those folks feel is real. I think there’s always going to be pain with these kinds of transformation that’s happening and it’s a terrible pain. Pain in general in the human experience is terrible. But I think I’m personally excited by the human AI collaboration as you’ve described in this whole process. I think if you just keep being open to using the tools, constantly trying the cutting edge tools, how they can make you more productive, how can they empower you as a creator, as an artist, or as an engineer, I think you’re going to just keep winning. There’s a lot of complicated trends underway. It can be hard to break them down and distinguish them. I think a lot of people like the theories that get the biggest traction on social media often don’t capture the real underlying motive forces at play there. But I think AI involved in code production will probably create a net benefit for the need for humanity to be involved in coding. It may change parts of jobs. I don’t think it’s going to obsolete anybody who’s willing to learn new ways of doing things. It’s always been this way. I think that there’s also a lot of over hype in AI. AI is really great at spewing out code that does something that a million GitHub repositories already do because it’s learned the underlying pattern. It’s notoriously hard to get to do something new that hasn’t been done before, especially when it’s a complex task. The bigger amount of code you ask AI for, the more it leaves you with just a mess of code that sort of works. Then that’s the problem with code, it like 99% works, but the 1%, it might be harder to get to 100% with AI than with hand coding. Everybody who’s looking at this topic should actually try using the coding assistants on hard problems and see how they do there. I think for me personally, it makes it more fun and faster to generate boiler play code so I can focus on the harder decisions, harder big picture decisions and harder innovative decisions and all that kind of stuff, and just makes programming more fun for me because I feel less lonely. Even when it gives the wrong code, I get like, “Oh, okay, well that’s a way to do it. That’s interesting.” Then you could talk to it. Maybe that shows something about the programming experience that it is in part sometimes a bit lonely.…

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