| Hi, this is Saritha in Bangalore. Coders in India fear for their futures. But first… Today's must-reads: • Chip stocks are soaring unexpectedly
• Meta's plan for minors in VR is under scrutiny
• Apple makes headway on new laptops If the sort of technology underpinning ChatGPT displaces software engineers, no single country would be impacted more than India, home to over 5 million coders. The prospect, however remote, is giving those like Palash Hade sleepless nights. The newly minted engineer from central India anticipates fewer software jobs to compete for in a country of 1.4 billion. Hade signed up for an online degree in data science and analytics from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. It'll help him stand out if job lines grow long, he hopes. Not long ago, India's outsourcing firms were so hungry for talent that they didn't even mind if an engineer's background was in chemicals or mining. Training people through in-house coding drills was routine. Fresh-faced recruits are still highly valued in the sector, which builds software systems for global customers like Wall Street banks, Silicon Valley tech titans and the world's largest airlines and retailers. India's (and Asia's) largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., has made 46,000 campus offers this year, its chief operating officer, N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, said on Bloomberg TV just after the firm missed profit estimates last week. These days, generative artificial intelligence and ChatGPT start and dominate every client conversation, he said. Change is fast approaching because of advanced AI, said CP Gurnani, chief executive officer at Tech Mahindra and a four-decade veteran of the IT services industry. At a guest lecture at IIT Hyderabad last week, he found students worried. His message to them: Brace yourselves. The question for Gurnani isn't whether AI will take over existing jobs, it's how fast the new technology will catalyze new jobs and opportunities even as it displaces old roles. Another cautionary perspective is offered by Professor Y Narahari, who teaches programming at the country's top engineering school, the Indian Institute of Science. His students aren't nervous about the advent of AI because they're the ones who will likely design systems to rival OpenAI's GPT models or be recruited for their skills by OpenAI itself, the scholar said. But tens of thousands of other engineers who don't have degrees from such elite schools have reason to worry. A slump in routine coding jobs is around the corner. Shraddha Kulkarni, a 21-year-old engineering student in Bangalore, has been actively using ChatGPT. Coding without the assistance of AI will cease, said the student. She thinks many entry-level coding jobs could be obliterated in five years. At this year's campus recruitment event, Kulkarni was selected by the tech unit of a global corporation she declined to name. What lies in store for next year's class is another matter, she said. Anxiety also pervades Reddit and Quora threads, where developers rue the hundreds of hours they invested in studying jumbled documentation and arcane blogs to build their skills. The advent of their AI-based programming usurpers is all too apparent to them now. —Saritha Rai Advocates are trying to apply the principles of transformative justice to address bias in video games. Elon Musk has incorporated an entity called X.AI that could potentially lay the groundwork for an artificial intelligence startup. Apple's sales in India hit a new high of almost $6 billion in the year through March. Video game maker Sega offered to buy Rovio in a deal that values the Finland-based creator of Angry Birds at about $776 million. Netflix apologized after widespread outages disrupted a live-streamed reunion episode of dating reality show Love Is Blind. Bing may replace Google as the default search service on Samsung Electronics Co. devices, according to a New York Times report. CXApp, a corporate software maker that pitches itself as an AI company, saw its stock surge 1,480% over three days last week. The crypto company Chia Network filed confidentially for an IPO. Meanwhile, the crypto miner Bitdeer finally went public after delaying its SPAC debut, and the shares sank. The satellite startup Astranis raised $200 million in venture capital and is preparing to put its hardware into space for the first time. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment