Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding

What comes next after a moment when companies sell existential risk but pursue public funding and DIY regulation, even as software developers question their life choices? Peter Norvig, distinguished education fellow at Stanford HAI and former Google research director, used his opening keynote at The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to speculate on the answer. Almost certainly, it's another AI conference – on Thursday in fact – given the two or three dozen of them that have bubbled up in San Francisco this year or are scheduled in the remaining three months. To get to the present, he took a detour through the past. He acknowledged the milestones of AlexNet and ImageNet in 2012, the Transformer architecture for machine learning in 2017, the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, and the emergence of reasoning and coding agents in 2024. …