Dear friends,
Andrej Karpathy, one of the Heroes of Deep Learning who currently works at OpenAI, quipped, “The hottest programming language is English.” While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t want the ease of instructing computers in English to discourage anyone from learning to code. Someone who is multilingual — who perhaps speaks English as a first language and Python as a second language — can accomplish much more than someone who knows only how to prompt a large language model (LLM).
It’s increasingly possible to tell a computer what you want in English (or whatever human language you’re most fluent in) and it will understand well enough to give you what you asked for. Even before LLMs, Siri and Alexa could respond to basic commands, and the space of English instructions that computers can follow is rapidly expanding. But coding is still immensely valuable. If anything, with the advent of LLMs, the value of coding is rising. Let me explain why.
Today, almost everyone has data: big companies, small companies, and even high school students running biology experiments. Thus, the ability to get a custom AI system to work on your own data is valuable. And while prompting an LLM can produce answers for a huge range of questions and generate everything from essays to poems, the set of things you can do with coding plus prompting is significantly larger, for now and the near future.
Let’s say I want a summary of every letter I’ve ever written in The Batch. I can copy-paste one letter at a time into an LLM like ChatGPT and ask for a summary of each, but it would be much more efficient for me to write a simple piece of code that iterates over all letters in a database and prompts an LLM to create summaries.
In the future, I hope recruiters will be able to write a few lines of code to summarize candidate reviews, run speech recognition on conversations with references, or execute whatever custom steps are needed in the recruiting workflow. I hope teachers will be able to prompt an LLM to generate learning tasks suited to their lesson plan, and so on. For many roles, coding + prompting will be more powerful than prompting via a web interface alone.
Furthermore, English is ambiguous. This contributes to why an LLM’s output in response to a prompt isn’t fully predictable. In contrast, most programming languages are unambiguous, so when you run a piece of code, you reliably (within reason) get back the same result each time. For important applications where reliability is important — say, deciding when to purchase an expensive plane ticket based on real-time prices, or sending a party invitation to everyone in your company — it’s safer to use code to carry out the final step committing to the action, even if an LLM were involved in researching destinations or drafting the invitation.
I believe we’re entering an era when everyone can benefit by learning to code. LLMs have made it more valuable than ever. Writing code that calls an LLM has made it easier to build intelligent applications than it was before LLM APIs became widely available. Specifically, everyone can benefit by learning to code AI applications, as I wrote with Andrea Pasinetti, CEO of Kira Learning, an AI Fund portfolio company.
If you don’t yet code, consider taking a Python course to get started. If you already code, I hope you will encourage others to take up this skill. This is a good time to help everyone learn to speak Python as a second language!
Keep learning,
Andrew