(Yicai) March 14 -- After Chinese internet giant Baidu's Chief Executive Officer Robin Li said that the profession of programmer will gradually disappear with the advancement of artificial intelligence, several information technology practitioners have expressed their disagreement as they believe AI is still premature.

A video game developer told Yicai that he has been using ChatGPT as an assisting tool and exploring the general capabilities of large language models since OpenAI launched its hit product in November 2022. ChatGPT can assist in solution design but cannot address technical details, he added, noting that LLMs’ ability to comprehend long texts is limited, so they cannot provide complete project-adaptable codes.

LLMs will bring about fundamental changes to human production and livelihood, Li said in an interview program aired on China Central Television on March 9. For example, programmers will no longer exist in the future because everyone will be able to carry out programmers' work with AI, he pointed out.

A programmer's job includes business requirement analysis, architecture design, feature development, testing, performance optimization, and security, a staffer at a leading Chinese internet company explained to Yicai. AI's influence can already be seen in feature development and testing, but only as an auxiliary function.

In the future, the tasks of feature development, testing, and performance optimization are highly likely to be replaced by AI, but business requirement analysis and architecture design are complex engineering tasks that are difficult for current-stage AI to meet, the internet firm's staffer added.

With the development of AI, the role of programmers will change, an internet venture capital insider told Yicai. Programmers need to learn how to use AI as an assistant to write basic code so they can redirect their focus to higher-level coding, the insider noted.

Programmers specialized in basic coding tasks have already been phased out, even before the advent of AI, as the competition within the industry is fierce, a game programmer with eight years of experience told Yicai. If programmers are truly going to be phased out by AI, it would not be because AI replaces them, but because they lack the skills to use AI, he added.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Futura Costaglione