AI is transforming work and might even live up to the hype

• Generative AI transforms technical tasks, making them accessible to non-experts.
• AI tools like v0 and Julius AI streamline processes like web development and data analysis.
• Vercel CFO uses generative AI tools to become a “quasi-coder.”

THE AI The boom has added billions of dollars to tech company valuations. Does it live up to the hype?

In a way, the answer is yes. This is particularly true when it comes to technical plumbing modern businesses. These are tasks that often happen behind the scenes and are either unknown or taken for granted by most non-technical people.

Generative AI burst onto the scene at the end of 2022 with OpenAIthe exit of ChatGPTa chatbot that answers many questions and creates realistic and compelling content.

Since that splashy launch, this new form of AI has quietly begun to transform more mundane tasks and processes, such as web development, data analysis, legal research, and writing code.

HAS VercelAt the Next.js conference in San Francisco earlier this year, the event was filled with young developers who were using AI models and tools to streamline hundreds of these technical tasks. This stuff was mostly handled by human technical employees. Now that’s changing in a major way.

“All the power used to be behind a door guarded by programmers paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now these capabilities are available to everyone,” said Rahul Sonwalkar, founder of Julius AI, a startup that uses data models. AI to automate data analysis.

Save on legal fees

It’s not just about startups. A good friend who is an executive at an investment fund recently used ChatGPT to research a legal issue.

The chatbot helped him understand much of the context, including relevant laws and other rules.

When he met with his law firm, he was able to move past the basics and get to the meat of the task more quickly. This is important when lawyers can cost anywhere from $500 to $1,000 per hour.

My friend estimates that this first AI-powered research saved his investment firm between $50,000 and $70,000 in legal fees and about 60 to 80 hours of work over 2 months.

20x more code at Google

HAS Googlegenerative AI is disrupting the way the internet giant creates products.

Another old friend of mine has worked at Google for over a decade. He recently described how he wrote 20 times more software code than before, thanks to generative AI tools.

It starts in the usual way, by typing an initial code. Then the AI ​​automatically completes much of the rest.

Technology sometimes automatically complements itself in the wrong direction, which essentially amounts to misunderstanding its intentions. It still requires technical skills to spot these occasional errors. But fixing it is pretty simple: it goes back to where its own code finished and types in some more of its own work. Then the system adjusts and performs the task precisely.

A financial director becomes a “quasi-coder”

Vercel Financial Director Marte Abrahamsen is not a professional coder. But even he has enjoyed the benefits of generative AI that makes technical tasks more accessible.

He cited that of Vercel v0 service, which allows anyone to enter requests in English and respond with code and results such as brand new websites.

“I can’t do complex coding, but I can type in English and v0 creates what I want. That makes me a quasi-coder,” Abrahamsen said.

The CFO said the tool helps him present his ideas to more technical colleagues more quickly and ensures that nascent products are in better shape at the pitch stage.

Vercel’s goal is to use generative AI to increase “iteration speed” by automating much of the technical blocking and troubleshooting so that developers can spend more time on the creative parts of their work, he explained.

“Making developers much more productive with generative AI – investors and Vercel are quite bullish on this. It’s a very interesting new use case for AI,” Abrahamsen told me in a recent interview.

Create a website in 2 minutes or less

I tried v0 myself on Friday. It took about 45 seconds to create a website based on this simple query: “Make me a website that looks like Business Insider.”

Vercel’s v0 system responded in English with the steps to follow. Then, on the right side of the page, he quickly extracted the required software code and presented a preview of the new website in less than a minute. Here is a look:

I asked for a small adjustment: “Make the background bluer and add photos.”

v0 responded with a similar response in English, followed by more code generation and an updated site.

I then asked to make the top of the site blue and the system added it in maybe 20 seconds.

I could go on, but you get the point. I don’t know how to code at all and I made a relatively solid site in about 2 minutes with v0.

2 million lines of code per day

Julius AI takes a similar approach to automating data analysis tasks. The service is used by scientists, marketers, hedge fund analysts and anyone else who needs to interpret a lot of data and is not expert in extracting such information from mountains of information .

The online tool can ingest data in many forms, including Excel tables and PDFs, or through APIs and databases. You can drag and drop them into an open window and ask questions in plain English. Julius AI then leverages various AI models to spot correlations in the data and generate insights in seconds via graphs and text outputs.

The service automatically generates the software code needed to perform this analysis and makes it available for reuse on other projects. This also helps users go back and check how the outputs were created.

Julius AI has about 2 million registered users and has generated more than 7 million data visualizations so far, according to Sonwalkar, who notes that the service writes about 2 million lines of code per day.

“It would take an army of human coders to pull this off,” he said. “A good engineer who focuses on a good day can produce about 1,000 lines of code.”

Quantitative hedge funds use Julius AI to create financial models from the data they put into the tool. A model could take into account currency changes and their impact on other parts of the world, like oil and gas prices, for example.

One of Julius AI’s clients is a hedge fund staffed by seven finance-expert employees.

“Normally, this company would also hire a quantitative programmer to create financial models for data analysis,” Sonwalker said. “AI now does this in seconds, without the need for a programming expert.”