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Elon Musk‘s xAI on Monday unveiled its updated Grok 3 artificial intelligence model as the startup pushes to keep pace with the advanced reasoning and search capabilities in competitors’ models. In the event livestreamed on Musk’s X, readers at the startup claimed Grok 3 performs better across math, science and coding benchmarks than Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and DeepSeek’s V3 model.Elon Musk claims that this AI model Grok-3 can create games, help in coding, handle PhD-level science questions and more. At the event, Musk and team showed how Grok-3 is already being used internally at his xAI company to save hundreds of hours on coding tasks. Not just Grok-3, big tech giants like Google have also revealed that they are using Artificial Intelligence to generate codes. With these developments, questions about the future of software engineering jobs come to mind, where AI is playing an increasingly dominant role.
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An AI model that thinks like a human
A senior member of xAI elaborated on Grok 3’s abilities at the launch event and talked about the importance of building an AI model that can think like a human. The team believes that this approach, combined with reinforcement learning, will make AI more efficient not only during training but also in real-world applications, according to a report in India Today.
“The best AI need to think like a human. To contemplate about all the possible solutions, self critique, verify all the solutions, backtrack and also think from the first principle. That’s a very important capability.”
“So we believe that as we take the best pre-trained model and continue training it with reinforcement learning, we elicit the additional reasoning capabilities that allow the model to become so much better and scale, not just in the training time, but actually in the test time as well. So we already found the model is extremely useful internally for our engineering, saving hours of time, hundreds of hours of coding time,” the xAI staff member revealed during the Grok 3 event, sitting alongside Musk.
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Are software engineer jobs at risk?
Concerns are growing over AI taking on more coding responsibilities as to whether this could lead to the replacement of human engineers. While major tech companies have not explicitly stated that AI will replace software engineering jobs, there are indications that AI will play a big role in the future of coding, the report said.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has also hinted at the possibility of AI agents taking on software engineering tasks. He mentioned that AI agents will soon perform many of the tasks that software engineers with a few years of experience currently handle. But, he also revealed that human oversight will still be necessary, particularly for more complex problems and innovative ideas. Altman envisions a future where AI is widely deployed across various sectors, making tasks easier and more efficient but not necessarily eliminating the need for human engineers.
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Similarly, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently announced that AI could replace mid-level engineers at tech companies as early as this year. AI-generated code is already becoming a norm at companies like Meta and Google. In fact, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that over 25 per cent of the new code at Google is now AI-generated, though human engineers still perform final reviews.
Despite reassurances from tech leaders that AI won’t immediately replace human engineers, the rapid advancement of AI suggests that mid-level coding jobs could be at risk in the future. With major tech companies already implementing layoffs and cost-cutting measures, concerns are growing that AI may eventually take over roles involving repetitive tasks.
Elon Musk has previously envisioned a future where jobs become optional due to AI and robotics. Speaking at a 2024 tech event in Paris, he predicted a world where most jobs would be automated, allowing people to work out of choice rather than necessity—more as a hobby than a requirement. He also floated the idea of a “universal high income” to support individuals in this AI-driven era.
While the full impact of AI on employment remains uncertain, software engineers may need to upskill and adapt to stay relevant, especially as AI models like Grok 3 continue to make significant strides in coding and other technical fields.