Is the "AI developer" a threat to jobs – or a marketing stunt? (opens in new tab)

The AI developer is as much a threat to jobs as the self driving car is a threat to truck drivers; a looming fear, always on the horizon but somehow paradoxically never getting closer. For my part, I'm going to keep doing work that is interesting and, as a bonus, extremely hard to replace with AI, and I'll cross this bridge when it gets here (Spoiler alert, I don't think that bridge is coming until long after I'm out of the industry, if ever).

> But we already have a co-piloting AI tool; it’s called GitHub Copilot! Microsoft launched it 2.5 years ago, and it became the leading AI coding assistant almost overnight. Today, more than 1.3 million developers pay for it (!!) across 50,000 companies.

> At $20/month, it’s a price point that is very hard to compete with, especially given how expensive GPU infrastructure is, which needs training and fine-tuning for operating large language models.

And Microsoft was reportedly losing $20 a month per user at this price point, as of early 2023.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-is-reportedly-losing...

This seems like a very difficult space for startups to compete. Devin has to be a lot better than copilot for people to spend money on it, which they need to if the authors don't want to burn through capital like Microsoft is.