(Yicai) April 25 -- Although Chinese tech companies Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu, and SenseTime Group have launched copilots, artificial intelligence will not replace programmers, according to industry insiders.

AI can assist in some entry-level jobs or low-level work, but the success level of advanced large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 in more serious business cases is even below 10 percent in certain scenarios, Prof. Lin Dahua, a scientist from the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said to Yicai.

AI will make coding more efficient, but coders will remain key to program development, said Jia Anya, head of SenseTime’s copilot team. SenseTime debuted its AI assistant last December to make programming over 50 percent more efficient. 

Shares of Hong Kong-listed SenseTime soared in the past two days after the software firm released the latest version of SenseNova, a ChatGPT-like LLM with improved mathematical and coding capabilities, on April 23. It also released a lightweight version of the copilot the same day, priced at CNY350,000 (USD48,300) for a team of as many as 100 persons.

Alibaba Cloud said earlier this month that the firm's coders are using AI. In the future, a fifth of all code will be generated by AI, but programmers remain key to research and development, an insider said, adding that this would give programmers more time to focus on system design and core business development.

The initial step of coding is building a framework, which requires programmers, but AI can complete some simple tasks after that, said Zhang Liaoyuan, head of Alibaba Cloud’s copilot tool. Moreover, workers need to verify the outcome.

Even Baidu admitted its code is no longer purely human-made as the search engine giant's Comate has crafted one-fourth of the company’s code. More than 10,000 companies, such as podcast platform Ximalaya Technology tech consultancy iSoftStone, and the Shanghai arm of Mitsubishi's elevator business, say that over half of the code written by Comate works, per Baidu.

Editor: Emmi Laine