Source: Data Intelligence Frontline
Author: Zhou Xiangyue
Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI
On October 24th, at the Olympic Sports Center in Hefei, Anhui, a large-scale technology summit was being held, and the crowd quickly filled the main venue. This was the scene of the 6th World Voice Expo hosted by iFLYTEK and the 2023 Global 1024 Developer Festival. Since 2017, the company has held such a conference on the day of the 1024 Programmer Festival every year.
On the same day, many companies such as Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, Unisound Software, and Xiaopeng Motors held external events or launched various internal sharing conferences, code competitions, and fun activities or welfare distribution for programmers.
In Beijing, Shenzhen, Changsha, and other places, various "2023 China Programmer Festival" related activities guided or organized by local governments have also emerged.
This year, a change is that many companies' programmer festival activities are linked to large models, which may change their careers.
01 How do big companies celebrate the 1024 Programmer Festival
During the week of October 24th this year, Tencent once again held Tencent Technology Week, with large models and AIGC as one of the key topics. Inside the WeChat headquarters, the anti-hair loss shampoo brand Zhangguang 101 held a "very timely" 1024 Programmer Day hair care market.
Speaking of which, anti-hair loss shampoo is definitely a regular item on the welfare list for the 1024 Programmer Festival of major companies. Many companies, including iFLYTEK, cloud computing company QingCloud, big data anti-fraud company DataVisor, and Tencent Classroom, have "addressed the urgent needs" and sent programmers the best representative of anti-hair loss—Bawang shampoo.
Data Intelligence Frontline learned that in addition to the regular events such as developer conferences and developer competitions, iFLYTEK also arranged a blind date event specifically for programmers to address their marriage and relationship issues.
At 9:00 am on October 24th, Zhou Hongyi's Weibo post revealed the 1024 Programmer Festival welfare for 360 employees. 360 gave each programmer a checkered shirt with a programmer-exclusive style.
Different from 360's clothing gift, ByteDance prepared a lot of surprises and a 1024 limited edition afternoon tea that employees could participate in by scanning a QR code, along with a 1024 Programmer Festival AI-Lab Research technology exchange meeting, allowing employees to drink tea, understand the application of large models, AI pharmaceuticals, quantum computing, and experience the most popular AI gameplay.
Large models were a hot topic at this year's 1024 Programmer Festival. Many technology giants such as Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, iFLYTEK, and Unisound Software prepared activities related to large models and AIGC.
For example, Baidu's theme for this year's internal 1024 Programmer Festival was "The Era of Large Models, Everyone is an Engineer." In the past, Baidu held the "Code Power Open Competition" and the "Engineering Efficiency Conference." This year, the activities were integrated and upgraded to three major chapters, with the addition of the "Citywide Hot AI" theme conference, mainly focusing on large models and AI originality, inviting technical experts to share their insights.
Since the first "Code Power Open" competition in 2020, Baidu has held 1024 activities for engineers every year. Especially in the past two years, with the development of low-code, large models, and other platforms and technologies, the "Code Power Open" competition has gradually extended from engineers to other roles, and this year, it has even launched the Prompt competition combined with large models, with non-R&D participants accounting for 39%.
On the Developer Festival on October 24th, iFLYTEK released the latest version of the iFLYTEK Starfire Cognitive Large Model V3.0, as well as intelligent programming assistants, Starfire research assistants, interactive English AI question and answer learning, and iFLYTEK Starfire medical large models and many other large model-related products.
At the technical open day held by domestic operating system company UnionTech on October 24th, the company introduced China's first open-source operating system deepin that integrates large models, and independently developed email, browser, and search functions that have been connected with large models such as Baidu Qianfan, iFLYTEK Starfire, Zhipu ChatGLM, and 360 Brain.
Not only technology giants, but many companies from other industries also sent blessings to programmers on this day. For example, game company miHoYo gave its employees a high-value customized power bank and alarm clock. The software development center of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China also sent programmers three different colors and meaningful afternoon tea blind boxes. Some companies even provided more "practical" benefits, giving all programmers a day off.
02 History of the Programmer Festival
The Programmer Festival was born with the continuous rise of the programmer community.
For a long time, people's inherent impression of programmers was mostly of geeks, hackers, and introverted tech-savvy men wearing checkered shirts and black-framed glasses.
However, the world's first recognized programmer was actually a woman. In August 1843, Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and later known as the "Enchantress of Numbers," published an article in the "Scientific Memoirs," with 25 pages translated from Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's paper on the Babbage Analytical Engine (the earliest prototype of a computer) and 41 pages of her own notes. In the final "Note G," Ada detailed how to use the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This algorithm was later considered the world's first computer program.
It was also from this time that the programmer community began to expand rapidly with the rapid development of computer technology. In the early days, this community was mainly composed of geeks, hackers, and individual heroes, and most software was still in the range of thousands or tens of thousands of lines, and had not truly formed as an industry. However, with Bill Gates founding Microsoft in 1975, the United States quickly became a highland of programmer culture. In the following decades, a large number of software companies emerged worldwide, rapidly driving the development of the software industry, and open source and innovation also became a major part of programmer culture.
The rise of China's programmer culture began in 1995 when the commercial application of the Internet officially began in China. One of the most sensational news that year was that "China's first programmer" Qiu Bojun resolutely rejected Microsoft's offer of a high annual salary of 750,000 RMB, and instead sold his villa to continue developing WPS software in hopes of breaking Microsoft Office's dominance in office software.
More grass-roots stories have been quietly planted. In 1995, after a brief trip to the United States, Jack Ma officially resigned from Hangzhou Electronic Industrial College, raised 20,000 RMB, and founded China Yellow Pages; at the age of 31, Charles Zhang, inspired by the entrepreneurial atmosphere prevalent in Silicon Valley, returned to China and soon founded the predecessor of Sohu, AtNet; Ding Lei, a young employee of Ningbo Telecom Bureau, was attracted by the Internet and resolutely resigned, moved to Shenzhen, and joined a foreign software company, and two years later founded NetEase; and from this year, Robin Li almost returned to China every year for inspection…
Source: Data Intelligence Frontline
Author: Zhou Xiangyue
Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI
On the path from the gradual rise of the domestic Internet to a full-blown trend, the idea of establishing a "Programmer Festival" began to be proposed internationally. In 1996, to resist computer virus creators, Dmitry Mendeleev, the editor-in-chief of the Russian "Computer World" magazine, proposed naming the first Friday of September as "Computer User Day," also known as "Pure Friday." However, it wasn't until July 24, 2009, that the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media officially proposed a new holiday arrangement, establishing the "Programmer Festival" on the 256th day of each year, which is September 13 and September 12 in leap years.
At that time, with the rapid development of the Internet, the position of programmers had become increasingly important in the industrial economy. Therefore, this day was quickly recognized as a holiday for all programmers by many other international technology companies and software enterprises.
In China, the idea of a Programmer Festival also emerged around the same time. In early October 2010, a programmer community called "Boke Garden" initiated a vote on the "Chinese Programmer Festival," proposing to designate October 24th as China's Programmer Festival and to hold online celebration activities on that day. The reason for choosing October 24th is that the world of programmers is binary, and 1024 is 2 to the power of 10, which is also an integer in the minds of programmers (1GB = 1024MB, 1MB = 1024KB).
However, this holiday did not receive much attention in its early days and was limited to small-scale dissemination. It wasn't until 2015 that an IT talent training company called "Chuanzhi Boke" broke the circle of the 1024 Programmer Festival by organizing the "No Overtime Carnival for All" programmer party, shooting promotional videos, and creating the "#1024 Programmer Festival" topic on the social platform Weibo.
Internet giants also played a significant leading role in this. With the rapid development of mobile Internet, these enterprises with a large number of programmer employees had developed to a stage where they needed to pay more attention to corporate culture and employee care. The 1024 Programmer Festival gradually gained attention and became a natural occurrence. For example, according to Baidu's official WeChat public account, the company has been offering benefits or activities for the 1024 Programmer Festival since 2014.
03 The Era of Large Models, Programmers Changing Themselves
Although the profession of a programmer has only been around for over 30 years in China, it is a role that cannot be ignored by anyone. More importantly, programmers are a profession that keeps pace with the times. It can be said that the rise of large models and AI this year will not only change various industries with artificial intelligence but will also fundamentally change the industry itself.
A widely recognized view is that large models will bring fundamental changes to programming work, empowering the entire process of code development and greatly improving the efficiency of programmers. Gartner even predicts that by 2025, 70% of applications will be built using low-code and no-code development platforms, with 80% of applications developed by non-IT workers.
In fact, this is currently the direction that all major large model organizations and large model application vendors are exploring and leading. Almost all large model vendors, including Microsoft, Baidu, Huawei, and iFLYTEK, have made code assistants one of their key driving directions.
On October 24th, iFLYTEK released the intelligent programming assistant iFlvCode2.0, which is said to improve efficiency by 50% in the design stage, 37% in the development stage, and 44% in the testing stage, significantly increasing the efficiency of software practitioners.
On the same day, Baidu also launched the Baidu Comate intelligent code assistant SaaS version. It is reported that the code assistance tool based on the Wenxin large model is widely used within Baidu, with an overall adoption rate of over 40% and a top user adoption rate of over 60%, generating 20% of the new code added by Baidu every day.
Will large models replace the work of programmers? Zhang Lei, Senior Vice President, CTO, and Chairman of the Deepin Community at UnionTech Software, told Data Intelligence Frontline that without solving fundamental technical issues of large models, such as hallucination and interpretability, they cannot replace humans. "For example, Microsoft's products are all called Copilot, which is the co-pilot, why not call it pilot? Because it really can't be fully automatic. Once it is fully automatic, there will be problems, so it still needs people to be the main driver."
Zhang Lei believes that large models are like a lever, which can amplify the good side and also amplify the bad effects. He gave an example, "Originally, a person could only write 100 lines of code in a day, but with the assistance of large models, they may be able to write 1000 lines, greatly improving the efficiency of programmers in writing code. But if a person originally wrote 10 lines of code a day, and 5 lines had bugs, under the leverage effect of large models, this problem may become even bigger. But overall, it will promote the entire industry, including the level of individuals and developers, which I think is a good thing."
Many industry insiders also believe that large models will change the division of labor and job types in the industry. Sun Hongjun, CTO of SoftBank Financial Services, told Data Intelligence Frontline that in the future, people in IT will be basically divided into several categories: one is specialized in data labeling and training, they understand business and data, similar to the previous data engineers; another is for development implementation, they can do big data development and other daily application systems, which is more comprehensive because of the assistance of AI tools; and there will also be a group of people doing large models and model training, which will change the job types. "Furthermore, large models will affect the entire development process of IT systems, including the logic of building application systems."
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