Has the singularity just taken a big step closer? I remember avidly consuming Ray Kurzweil's ideas in his book, "The Singularity is Near," some 15, maybe 20 years ago.
Right now, on my phone, I have an AI helper, an artificial intelligence that writes posts and code for me. It's not just restricted to Python code—it covers many languages. I've tried it with JavaScript, with VBA, the Flutter framework, and a few others.
On the whole, it's very good, but it seems particularly proficient at Python. That's when I put two and two together and arrived at 42, **probably**.
A lot of these AI models are written using Python. You've got an artificial intelligence that can write Python code, and can help a Python programmer—and that Python programmer is going to make the next iteration, the next AI. See where I'm going with this?
We are on the first step of the seriously steep part of the singularity graph. It is a truly exponential step as described by Ray Kurzweil.
AI has just grabbed the Singularity and dragged it with great force towards us.
I am a complete amateur with Python and have just written some code that creates a folder on a Google Drive—a folder with subfolders. In each subfolder, Python placed a new document, a document with the same name as the folder but concatenated with " - Notes. " " - Notes" appended to the end of the containing folder name. It's the Google document in which I can write notes about whatever's in the folder. Nothing particularly special or unusual about doing this, except that I did it, with very little effort, and the aid of an AI. And it didn't take too long.
Me, a Python amateur, and on the other end of the programming scale, you've got experts who write Python code for a living, experts who have written the Python code to create artificial intelligences. These programmers are using the artificial intelligence programs to enable them to write better code, and more code! They are constructing the next generation of artificial intelligence. The next generation of artificial intelligence isn't very far away.
Whilst writing this, it occurred to me that I could employ Artificial Intelligence "Chat GPT" to help me write a new programming language. I mean, there are certain things I don't like about the programming languages I use, why not write my own programming language? Then I realized, "that's stupid." I'm already writing programs in an easy, natural way without any effort. I just talk to Chat GPT. I'm already doing, using, the much sought-after natural programming language!
With Chat GPT and the other artificial intelligences—and indeed the ones that are just over the horizon—we will very soon have the ability for anyone to be able to say, I want a piece of software that does this, that, or the other.
And there it is. It will be delivered to you. Ready to go, tested. You might be able to provide the AI with some data in CSV format, any other sort of data structure and say: "Here's the data, this is the report I want to build, work with that. Give me a report every week, every day, every month."
The last time I wanted Chat GPT to write me some code, I didn't specify the language, I just told it what I was after and asked it to choose a language and write some code. In fact, it did choose Python, but the point is you don't want to restrict it with a specification in your question. You probably don't know as much about it as Chat GPT does!