By World Socialist Web Site
Publication Date: 2026-02-11 04:50:00
In early 2025, the high-tech market was rocked by the announcement of a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, that it had developed a chatbot as good as OpenAI’s (Chat GPT), at a fraction of the cost and without the latest high-end chips.
Earlier this year, the market was once again thrown into turmoil when AI company Anthropic launched a new tool called Claude, which, combined with a number of plugins, is capable of performing a range of complex tasks, most notably writing software.
Noted American software engineer Aditya Agarwal, who helped found Facebook and was chief technology officer at Dropbox, summarized the impact in comments he reported on Financial Times (FT).
“It was very clear that we would never write code by hand again. Something I was very good at is now free and available in abundance,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether this is an exaggerated assessment, but his comments suggest that…