Editorial Notes

Dear Readers,

In a Hard Fork podcast last year Sam Altman, the cofounder, former-and-now-again CEO of OpenAI, was asked what the advent of generative AI code development tools means to the people who write code. His response: It used to be a good idea to be a coder. Instead, there will be great demand for people that are very good at using AI tools to code. The world's carmakers and suppliers are striving to put software development front and center, but they have been constrained by the shortage of programmers. To me the answer to this problem is obvious. Carmakers and suppliers need to get very good at using AI tools to code.

By now the world knows a lot about ChatGPT, OpenAI's remarkable large language model. Having been fed with voluminous amounts of publicly available texts from the Internet, ChatGPT can generate a poem, a song, or a technical report, even draft a lawsuit, and write code.

Microsoft is OpenAI's largest investor, by far. The company owns GitHub, a popular resource used for code sharing. Introduced in 2021, GitHub's Copilot code development tool benefits from GitHub's massive store of publicly available code. It is based on OpenAI's GPT. According to GitHub, Copilot is the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool, capable of programming 50 % faster than programming without the tool.

The auto industry may be more familiar with Amazon CodeWhisperer. Amazon Web Services has been promoting the AI coding tool especially to the auto industry as yet another reason why carmakers should centralize their software development in the cloud. “Nearly all of our automotive customers are exploring generative AI coding tools”, said Richard Felton, senior practice manager at AWS, “not only does it make software developers 30 % more efficient, but it keeps track of the provenance of the code in order to comply with safety standards”.

Despite the need, the auto industry is proceeding with caution. “AI for code generation bears manifold risks such as cybersecurity and safety and should be treated with care”, said Christof Ebert, managing director of Vector Consulting Services. Anup Sable, CTO of KPIT Technologies, noted: “These are early days of observation for the industry, to experiment and see the impact”.

Best regards,

Paul Hansen

Editor

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