OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, has made a bold prediction: AI will surpass human coders forever—by the end of this year. Weil made the statement while speaking with Varun Mayya and Tanmay Bhat on their YouTube show Overpowered, responding to a question about Anthropic’s claim that coding automation would happen by 2027.
"At the rate we're going, I would be surprised if it's 2027. I think it's going to be sooner," Weil said, emphasizing how rapidly OpenAI’s models are advancing.
Weil shared insights into OpenAI's AI development, explaining how each new version of GPT has dramatically improved in competitive coding. "GPT-01 preview was, I think, the best like the millionth best competitive programmer in the world," he noted. "This doesn't sound great, but there are around 30-40 million programmers in the world. So you're like top 2-3%."
Then came GPT-01, which, according to Weil, ranked among the top 1,000 competitive programmers globally. But now, OpenAI is on the verge of an even bigger leap.
"GPT-03, which is coming soon, according to the same benchmarks, is the 175th best competitive coder in the world. And as we are starting to train the successor models, they're already better," he said.
Weil believes this year will be a historic turning point: "I think this is the year that, at least by competitive coding benchmarks, AI becomes better than humans at competitive coding forever. In the same way that computers passed humans at multiplying 70 years ago and AI passed humans at chess 15 years ago. This is the year that AI gets better than humans at programming forever... and there's no going back."
A world where everyone can code?
Weil highlighted the transformative impact AI-powered coding will have, making software development accessible to everyone. "Imagine all the things that you can do if you don't need to be an engineer to create software. AI passing humans at software is way more important than AI passing humans at chess, because with software, you can create anything you want. What a democratizing effect this can have on the world if everybody can create software."
However, he also noted that human expertise will still matter. "Understanding what problems to solve, where to focus your work, where the leverage is—those kinds of things are still going to matter," Weil explained.
According to Weil, AI will not replace humans entirely but will complement every job. "You're going to be using it day in and day out to augment yourself in your job," he predicted. "People are going to increasingly be sort of managers of these AI employees that will do a lot of the basic work for them."