AI will soon eliminate most outsourced coding jobs in India as the technology will drastically reduce the need for them, according to a leading AI expert.
India’s “outsourced coders up to level three programmers will be gone in the next year or two, whereas in France, you’ll never fire a developer,” Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, said in a call with UBS analysts, attributing these differences to better workers’ protections in France.
The comments were reported by CNBC on Tuesday.
There are about five million coders based in India, according to an April 17 Bloomberg report.
This isn’t Mostaque’s first bold claim about AI. In an interview on the Moonshots and Mindsets podcast posted on June 29, Mostaque — whose company created Stable Diffusion, a tool that transforms text into AI-generated art — predicted AI could replace most programmers in five years.
He later caveated his comment saying he was specifically referring to traditional coders.
Tech jobs are one of the professions most likely to be replaced by AI, Insider’s Aaron Mok and Jacob Zinkula previously reported.
But not everyone shares Mostaque’s pessimism.
GitHub’s CEO Thomas Dohnke told Computer Weekly last year that AI could help developers be more productive. “It’s so much more attractive to have an AI assistant with you, instead of reading stacks of books or wiki articles.”
Additionally, workers with AI skills stand to gain as the tech industry is placing a greater focus on talent in this area, Insider’s Thomas Maxwell reported.
Emad Mostaque did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.
