- Generative AI is transforming technical tasks, making them accessible to non-experts.
- AI tools like v0 and Julius AI streamline processes such as web development and data analysis.
- Vercel's CFO uses generative AI tools to become a "quasi-coder."
The AI boom has added trillions of dollars to tech company valuations. Is it living up to the hype?
In some real ways, the answer is yes. This is especially true when it comes to the technical plumbing of modern companies. These are tasks that often go on behind the scenes and are either unknown or taken for granted by most non-technical people.
Generative AI burst onto the scene in late 2022 with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers many questions and creates realistic and convincing content.
Since that flashy launch, this new form of AI has quietly begun to transform more mundane jobs and processes, such as web development, data analysis, legal research, and code writing.
At Vercel's Next.js conference in San Francisco earlier this year, the event was packed with young developers who were using AI models and tools to streamline hundreds of these technical tasks. This stuff has mostly been run by human technical employees. Now, that's changing in major ways.
"All the power was previously behind a gate guarded by programmers who were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now, these capabilities are available to all," said attendee Rahul Sonwalkar, founder of Julius AI, a startup that's using AI models to automate data analysis.
Saving on legal fees
It's not just startups. A good friend who's an executive at an investment fund used ChatGPT recently to research a legal issue.
The chatbot helped him understand a lot of the background, including relevant laws and other rules.
When he met with his law firm, he was able to jump past the basics and get to the meat of the task more quickly. This is important when attorneys can cost $500 to $1,000 an hour.
My friend estimates this initial AI-powered research saved his investment firm $50,000 to $70,000 in legal fees and roughly 60 to 80 hours of work time over 2 months.
20x more code at Google
At Google, generative AI is upending how the internet giant creates products.
Another old friend of mine has worked at Google for well over a decade. He recently described how he's writing 20 times more software code than he used to, thanks to generative AI tools.
He starts in the usual way, by typing in some initial code. Then the AI autocompletes much of the rest.
The technology sometimes autocompletes in the wrong direction — essentially misunderstanding his intentions. He still needs the technical skills to spot these occasional mistakes. But fixing it is pretty straight forward: He goes back to where his own code ended and types a bit more of his own work. Then the system adjusts and completes the task accurately.
A CFO becomes a 'quasi-coder'
Vercel CFO Marten Abrahamsen is no professional coder. But even he's experienced the benefits of generative AI making technical tasks more accessible.
He cited Vercel's v0 service, which lets anyone type in English language requests and responds with code and outputs such as brand new websites.
"I can't do complex coding, but I can type in English and v0 creates what I want. This turns me into a quasi-coder," Abrahamsen said.
The CFO said this tool helps him get ideas in front of more technical colleagues quicker, and ensures the nascent products are in better shape at the pitch stage.
Vercel's goal is to use generative AI to increase "iteration velocity" by automating a lot of the technical blocking and tackling so developers can spend more time on the creative parts of their jobs, he explained.
"Making developers much more productive with generative AI — investors and Vercel are quite bullish on this. That's a very interesting new use case for AI," Abrahamsen told me in a recent interview.
Creating 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 request: "Make me a website that looks like Business Insider."
Vercel's v0 system responded in English with the steps it would take. Then, on the right hand side of the page, it swiftly pumped out the required software code and previewed the new website in less than a minute. Here's a look:
I asked for a little tweak: "Make the background more blue and add photos."
v0 responded with a similar English language answer, followed by more code generation and an updated site.
I then asked to make the top of the site blue and the system added that in maybe 20 seconds.
I could go on, but you get the point. I can't code at all, and I made a relatively solid website in about 2 minutes with v0.
2 million lines of code a day
Julius AI is taking a similar approach to automate data-analysis tasks. The service is used by scientists, marketing folks, hedge fund analysts and anyone else who needs to interpret a lot of data and isn't an expert at pulling such insights from mountains of information.
The online tool can ingest data in many forms, including Excel tables and PDFs, or via APIs and databases. You can drag and drop these into an open window and ask questions in plain English. Julius AI then taps into various AI models to spot correlations in the data and generate insights in seconds via charts and text outputs.
The service automatically generates the software code needed to do this analysis, and makes that available to re-use 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 pumped out more than 7 million data visualizations so far, according to Sonwalkar, who notes the service writes roughly 2 million lines of code a day.
"It would take an army of human coders to do that," he said. "A good engineer who's focusing on a good day can put out about 1,000 lines of code."
Quantitative hedge funds use Julius AI to create financial models from the data they drop into the tool. One model might factor in currency changes and how that impacts other parts of the world, such as oil and gas prices, for instance.
One Julius AI customer is a hedge fund with seven employees who are finance experts.
"Normally this firm would also hire a quantitative programmer to create financial models for data analysis," Sonwalker said. "AI does this in seconds now, without the need for a programming expert."