Programmers will be surpassed by AI this year

Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI, shared his perspective. Photo: Techcrunch .

Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, believes that by the end of this year, AI will surpass human programmers, marking a historic moment in the technology industry.

In January, Dario Amodel, CEO of AI company Anthropic, predicted that AI would outperform humans in most areas by 2027. In an interview with two YouTubers on the Overpowered channel on March 16, Kevin Weil seemed to agree.

He even confidently stated that at the current pace of AI, it could happen sooner than expected. Citing OpenAI's released models, he explained the remarkable progress of artificial intelligence.

With GPT-o1, Weil shared that from the very beginning, the technology was capable of reaching the level of 2-3% of the 30-40 million programmers in the world.

GPT-o3, the soon-to-be-released version, is already in the top 175 of the best programmers. And as successor models start training, they're already outperforming it even further.

Mr. Weil believes that by 2025, AI will completely surpass humans in programming, according to competitive metrics. He compares it to how computers surpassed humans in calculation 70 years ago or AI beat humans in chess 25 years ago.

“This is the year that AI will surpass humans in programming forever… and there is no turning back,” Weil told the two hosts.

While he believes AI will take the lead in programming, OpenAI’s director doesn’t completely rule out the importance of humans. On the contrary, intelligence and thoughtful guidance are still needed.

“Understanding what problems need to be solved, where to focus the work, and finding out what your strengths are, those things will still be important,” he said.

AI will do the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, humans will need to develop the skills needed to solve larger problems and manage the tasks analyzed by AI. This could create a world where anyone can participate in software development, without having to be a programming expert.

Ultimately, Weil predicts that we will use AI every day to optimize our work, with humans becoming managers of “AI agents,” tools that will do the basic work for them.