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Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, thinks that AI will soon be able to replicate the skills of a junior software engineer.
“Not that far,” he said during Sequoia Capital’s “AI Ascent” event, when asked how far AI was from being on par with an entry-level engineer. “I will claim that’s probably possible in the next year-ish.”
Plenty of tech leaders have made similar predictions as models have continued to improve at coding, and AI tools become increasingly popular among programmers. With sweeping layoffs across the tech industry, entry-level engineers are already fielding intense competition — only to see it compounded by artificial intelligence.
Still, Dean said, AI has more to learn beyond the basics of programming before it can produce work at the level of a human being.
“This hypothetical virtual engineer probably needs a better sense of many more things than just writing code in an IDE,” he said. “It needs to know how to run tests, debug performance issues, and all those kinds of things.”
As for how he expects it to acquire that knowledge, Dean said that the process won’t be entirely unlike that of a person trying to gain the same skills.
“We know how human engineers do those things,” he said. “They learn how to use various tools that we have, and can make use of them to accomplish that. And they get that wisdom from more experienced engineers, typically, or reading lots of documentation.”
Research and experimentation is key, he added.
“I feel like a junior virtual engineer is going to be pretty good at reading documentation and sort of trying things out in virtual environments,” Dean said. “That seems like a way to get better and better at some of these things.”
Dean also said the impact “virtual” engineers will likely be significant.
“I don’t know how far it will take us, but it seems like it’ll take us pretty far,” he said.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication.
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