On Program Synthesis and Large Language Models

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2024-12-12 09:00:02

Much has been made of the abilities of the new developments in machine intelligence and in particular of what chatbots such as ChatGPT that are based on large language models (LLMs) are capable of. While these new pieces of software are impressive when it comes to generating text, some people in the computing community take this observation much further and, in my opinion, much too far. They claim programming will be a thing of the past. In a January 2023 Communications column, Matt Welsh put forward this opinion: “Programming will be obsolete. I believe the conventional idea of ‘writing a program’ is headed for extinction, and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed. In situations where one needs a ‘simple’ program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.”14 This quote contains two claims. First, that most software in the future that is not “simple” will take the form of AI systems. Secondly, that any software not of this form will be automatically generated. A consequence of this rather sweeping claim is that since there is no need to program, there is no need to study programming or properties of programs. Computer science can finally go away!

The first claim made by Welsh can never be refuted. For what does it mean that a piece of software is “simple”? The phrasing of the claim largely implies any piece of software that does not take the form of an AI system is simple.

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