Link: Is the “AI developer”a threat to jobs – or a marketing stunt?

What if AI dev tool startups have been backed into a corner by Microsoft, which has eaten their lunch? The interesting thing about Devin is that in its current form it feels more like a coding assistant that can get some things done. It makes mistakes, needs input, and gets stuck on 6/7 bugs on GitHub. It’s a helpful tool, always available, but not a replacement for a developer. It’s more a copilot. But we already have a co-piloting AI tool; it’s called GitHub Copilot! Microsoft launched it 2.5 years ago, and it became the leading AI coding assistant almost overnight. Today, more than 1.3 million developers pay for it (!!) across 50,000 companies. At $20/month, it’s a price point that is very hard to compete with, especially given how expensive GPU infrastructure is, which needs training and fine-tuning for operating large language models. Usually, we see startups innovate with new tooling, and Big Tech then catches up and builds their own tools, or acquires some competitors and integrates them. However, Microsoft was one of the first to launch an AI coding assistant, years ahead of most other startups. When we looked at GitHub Copilot alternatives, all were launched at least a year after GitHub Copilot’s 2021 launch except Tabnine, launched in 2019. #

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Yoooo, this is a quick note on a link that made me go, WTF? Find all past links here.