Texti Newsletter #18: Devin is Killing jobs, Robots are near.
Texti Newsletter #18
This was a beautiful spring week, it blossomed beautifully and it was definitely the AI sprint week. Mid journey improved their face generation algorithm, and now it doesn't just generate same facial expression all the time. But the most important parts are the following:
The highlights of the week:
Devin takes the software engineer job
Figure 01 is now able to talk and interact with humans
Sorry this time you'll have to go through the entire story. I feel this is a pivoting point in our history.
Long Story:
Everybody's been talking about AI taking our jobs. First writers, then artists, now software engineers... 😭
A company called Cognition Labs, just announced their first AI Software Engineer. According to them it's the most capable of all of them so far, beating existing models considerably by about 100% (more on this later). It has it's own terminal, browser, code editor, learning abilities, and a time-line to follow through it's progress. Veeery impressive!
In the following demo we can see how Devin, went through a blog post, and learned how to generate images hidden in plain sight, and generated some images there.
I mean this looks extremely promising. The media went: Omg omg omg, software engineers now you gonna suck dicks as well, death from your own creation! Hahahahahahaahhahahah *cough, cough* hahahahahhaha!!!111
Now, let's be real, I'm a software engineer, and I would like to go one by one with this one.
Am I afraid I'm going to lose my job? Not really, what Devin does is extremely technical and an uneducated person wouldn't really understand how to fix it.
Will AI replace my job? Eventually, of course it will replace my current job. However, that said, I think the future software engineer is a micro-manager of multiple Devins. To make the best analogy I can to the real world, is System Administrators manage multiple Servers and environments at the same time. Servers work on their own, but from time to time they glitch out, and you need to come by and fix em. This is what a software engineer of the future will look like.
But it beat existing models considerably by about 100% Which means that it can currently solve about 13% of the existing problems in the given bench mark, so in the other 87%, a human will still do better.
But it can pass job interviews! and I cannot! 😭 Job interviews often rely on general knowledge and algorithm solving. And well machines are the best at solving problems based on a step by step instruction. It's also cheating, because AI has access to internet at all times, while you as a human must remember things by heart. It's not really an apples to apples 🍎 != 🍏 comparison.
But it can already complete jobs on upwork! There are very trivial jobs in upwork that can be completed literally by anybody, that can dedicate 2 hours of their life in understanding how to accomplish the job. Look at it from the bright side – devin will create your upwork profile and then you'll get jobs because it's going to be easier to apply.
Simply by looking at the promoted demos from congition labs, you can draw some conclusions.
Software engineer jobs are going to change drastically, and the industry will adapt to it fast. Devin is just the beginning and to me it's more of a copilot on steroids to which you can give stupid tasks, and focus more on productive work rather than monkey job.
They've shown only what it can, purposely hiding what it cannot, just to jump onto the hype train, misdirecting people's attention from the what it can't do and bringing more attention from investors to pour money in.
Probably one of the most important thing is: You have to give pretty technical and precise instructions. This one is a pretty big deal. Because creative people, often lack technical and precise knowledge, they know what they want, but they don't know how to explain it in details, and that's the Achilles' heel, of general purpose large language models.
While we're closing the gap there's still a long way ahead.
iRobot movie scenario is closer than you think
TLDR:
A company called Figure.ai, just demo-ed their own robot, that can talk and interact with humans, using the power of OpenAI, using multi-modal capabilities, talk, see, interact and remember! Suuuper Impresive.
Long Story:
This week a company called Figure.ai, showed what they have achieved with that $675 Million raised from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, OpenAI and Microsoft. Their robot was able to:
Distinguish objects on the table, by using a 10Hz (10 images per second), camera for eyes.
Percept and follow audio instructions given via microphones in the body
Interact with the objects on the table, in a very accurate manner, using 100Hz (100times per second) signals given to the robot arms, and body.
Mimic human body behavior when moving, to keep it human friendly and approachable.
Remember the context of the whole conversation through-out.
This is very impressive and probably one of the most advanced Robots we've seen so far! Movement accuracy and control is just soooo good, i'm very impressed! But it's also suuuper slow to answer, feels like a sloth from Zootopia.
Source: giphy.com
Technically it has a battery that can last about 5 hours, so must be always close to the socket, and it's still a prototype, still a long way to go until mass-production, but really promising at the moment.
I cannot stand the similarities it has visually to the robots from iRobot, Sci-Fi movie.
Source: giphy.com
We stand at a pivoting point in our life once again, on one side, Software Engineers are about to go extinct, on the other side, Robots are to take over another set of jobs:
Cleaning services
Construction workers
Mining
Agriculture
Anything that can be done physically following a simple procedure.
The future might look scary, but don't worry it isn't. You as a human will still be there to control the robot most of the time, and as in the case of software engineer jobs, instead of managing a bunch of software bots, you as a human will have the power to control a bunch of actual robots 🤖! You will have your own empire of robots that will execute your orders! And as such will grant you an edge over everybody else.
Just imagine if you could work in the harshest conditions on earth and all it's gonna take, isn't to loose a human, but rather replace a motherboard?
You could make oases 🏝️ from places people used to think were uninhabitable before, because you could just throw in a bunch of robots to handle the heavy lifting, and you'd come over and collect the harvest!
I truly believe the future is bright because technology is here to serve humans, and not to overtake them, it might not look like this at first glance, but take one step back and you will see a greater picture!
What a time to be alive! The future is now! ❤️️️️️️️
