Why I changed my mind about AI and you should too

There’s no denying that the launch of ChatGPT was a historically significant event, but is that because it was the first glorious step towards a super-intelligent future or because it was the beginning of a world full of AI snake oil salesmen? I’ve long thought that large language models, the technology behind AI chatbots, were fascinating but flawed, which puts me firmly in the snake oil camp. But a week of vibe coding has revealed something surprising: both the proponents and the skeptics are wrong.

First I should explain. Vibe coding, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a term coined about a year ago by Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and previously worked there. It refers to the process of software development where you “vibrate” an AI model, instructing it in simple language while letting it generate the actual code. Recently I’ve seen people saying that the latest…