Stability AI CEO: There Will Be No (Human) Programmers in Five Years

Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has a provocative prediction as artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly transforms our world: “There will be no programmers in five years.” Indeed, the futuristic CEO seems to envision a near-future shaped by the capabilities of AI.

Mostaque talked about the current status of the AI industry and his vision in an interview with Peter H. Diamandis for the Moonshots and Mindsets Podcast. And that vision, he said, can only go peer forward as far as five years.

The future doesn’t look too bright for human coders, Mostaque concluded—and there is some evidence to back his argument.

Data from GitHub reveals that “41% of all code right now is AI generated,” Mostaque remarked. More interestingly, “In three months we overtook Bitcoin and Ethereum (in Github) and developed a popularity (there),” a testament to AI’s growing popularity over cryptocurrency.

Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the world’s most popular open-source image generator. The company’s ambitions, however, include a wide range of projects, spanning multiple sectors, from building models for protein folding, DNA analysis, and chemical reactions to language models and audio-visual data processing.

Stability AI says it aims to construct the building blocks for a “society OS.”

Looking to the immediate future, Mostaque envisions groundbreaking changes in our communication and access to information.

“By the end of next year,” he says, “I believe you’ll have ChatGPT on your mobile phone without internet (connection).” With AI models fully resident on mobile phones, our conversational interactions could undergo a radical transformation.”

Despite the rapid strides being made in AI, concerns about its potential impact in the world persist. Stability AI is tackling this challenge head-on by building personalized models. Their goal is to enable every individual, company, or culture to have an AI system that reflects their own narratives and unique perspectives.

Decentralizing AI is key to their strategy, Mostaque explains, ensuring AI technology benefits individuals rather than working against them —pretty similar to the ethos of crypto.

Mostaque highlighted his company’s commitment to transparency and their belief in democratizing access to AI technology. Besides Stable Diffusion, Mostaque’s team has open-sourced large language models that he says have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Concerns around job security also inevitably surface. On that front, Emad Mostaque paints a different picture. Like Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum co-founder who once countered fears of job elimination by proclaiming Ethereum as a “destroyer of jobs, creator of better ones,” Mostaque approaches the AI revolution with similar optimism. He envisages AI as a tool that enhances human potential, not a threat that annihilates it.

“Humans are humans. Bring them the information that creates the most value, and you will change the world.”