IBM CEO does not think that AI will replace programmers anytime soon
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says that despite the Trump administration Attacks against globalismGlobal trade is not dead. In fact, he thinks that the United States’s key to growth will adopt an international exchange of goods.
“So, I am a firm believer – I think it is up to economists who studied world trade in the 1800s – and I think their point of view has been, each 10% increase in world trade leads to a 1% increase in local GDP,” Krishna said in an interview on stage in SXSW on Tuesday. “So, if we really want to optimize even for [growth]You must have a global trade.
Global trade goes hand in hand by allowing overseas talents to flow in the United States, said Krishna. The administration and its allies called for an increase in restrictions student And H-1B work visasWhat they claim to put American citizens in a disadvantage.
“We want people to come here and bring their talent with them and apply this talent,” said Krishna. “And we also want to develop our own talent, but you cannot develop it as well if you do not bring the best people from around the world so that our people can also learn. We must therefore be an international talent center, and we should have policies that accompany this. »»
During the big interview, Krishna approached not only geopolitics but AI, what he thinks is a precious technology – but no panacea.
He disagreed with a Recent prediction by Dario AmodeiThe CEO of Anthropic, that 90% of the code will be written by AI in the next three to six months.
“I think the number will look more like 20 to 30% of the code could be written by AI – not 90%,” said Krishna. “Are there very simple use cases?” Yes, but there is an equally complicated number where it is going to be zero. »»
Krishna said he thought that AI would ultimately make programmers more productive, increasing their results and their employers rather than eliminating programming jobs, as predicted by certain AI critics.
“If you can make 30% more code with the same number of people, will you get more written or less code?” He said. “Because history has shown that the most productive company wins a market share, then you can produce more products, which allows you to obtain more market share.”
Certainly, IBM has a direct interest in presenting an AI as non -threatening. The company sells a range of AI products and services, including assistance coding tools.
Declarations are also a bit of a reversal for Krishna, who declared in 2023 that IBM planned to hang hiring On the back-office functions that the company provided that it could replace with tech.
Krishna compared the debates on AI replacing workers with early debates on calculators and photoshop replacing mathematicians and artists. He recognized that there are “unresolved” challenges around intellectual property where it concerns the training and results of the AI, but that in the end, technology is a positive – and increasing – force -.
“It’s a tool,” said Krishna about AI. “If the quality that everyone produces becomes better by using these tools, while even for the consumer, you now consume a better quality
. “”This tool will become cheaper, predicted Krishna. While he noted that so-called reasoning models like Openai O1 require a lot of computer science and are therefore with a high intensity of energy, he thinks that AI will use “less than 1%” of the energy it uses today thanks to emerging techniques like those demonstrated by the Chinese AI startup In depth.
“I think Deepseek gave us an overview that you can live with a much smaller model,” said Krishna. “Now the question is still arising, do you still need very big models to start?” And I think that’s what [DeepSeek] did not speak.
But while the AI merchants, Krishna is not convinced that it will help humanity to achieve new knowledge, echoing a recent test By hugging the co-founder of front Thomas Wolf. On the contrary, Krishna thinks that quantum computer – a technology in which IBM is strongly invested, and not for nothing – will be the key to accelerating scientific discovery.
“AI learns knowledge, literature, graphics, etc. already produced,” said Krishna. “He does not try to understand what will come […] I am the one who does not believe that the current generation of AI will bring us to what we are called general artificial intelligence, […] When AI can have all the knowledge, be completely reliable and answer questions beyond those who have been responsible for Einstein or Oppenheimer or all the winners of the Nobel Prize. »»
Krishna’s claims contrast with those of the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, who argued that “Supentilelligent“AI is in the field of possibility in the coming years and could massively accelerate innovation.
