OpenAI recently released ChatGPT for anyone to use on their Website. ChatGPT is a large language model that can have conversations with you and much much more. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should consider doing so before reading the rest of this post. ChatGPT content has exploded on Twitter as well.
For brevity, when I refer to AI, in this post I mean large language models like ChatGPT.
Here are my predictions:
AI assisted programming will result in increased efficiency for programmers who embrace it. AI will bootstrap new projects. It will help you find bugs. It will implement algorithms for you. It will write code much faster than you can. It will document your code. It will explain your code. It will write tests for you. It will improve your code. etc. Amazon CodeWhisperer and Github Copilot were just the beginning.
AI assisted programming will not reduce the need for programmers, but it will reduce the demand for programmers who refuse to use AI. Programmers who utilize AI will have advantages over those who don’t. If an AI can generate unit tests for your application in seconds what would take you an hour, then you should take advantage of the AI. I personally do not think there will be many (if any) types of programming where AI will not be of great assistance. Think of it this way. When high level languages like FORTRAN were released, did it kill the demand for assembly programmers? Yes and no. Very few companies these days have any need for assembly programmers, but some do and pay very well. Meanwhile, pretty much every software company needs programmers who write in high level languages.
AI won’t be able to deliver complex end-to-end applications for a long time but when it can, product managers and designers will become programmers. By end-to-end, I mean applications that can be fully written and incrementally improved by AI with very minimal human programmer intervention. By complex, I mean anything more complicated than a CRUD application with a frontend slapped onto it.
Fully managed platforms for AI generated applications will become common. This is the shortcut to AI being able to deliver end-to-end applications quickly. Companies will design platforms with composable parts with a natural language interface to create applications and run them on the platform. The tech is already to the point where this should be possible so I expect to see it very soon.
AI competition will be fierce. OpenGPT will not be the only player. There will be a community of AIs with many tuned to specific domains and at differing price points. I imagine annual competitions will AI will compete on problem sets specifically designed to be challenging for AI.
Utilizing AI will be a skill. The existence of AI won’t mean that everyone will get the same value out of it. Think of it this way. Learning how to efficiently get accurate information on the Internet is a skill that takes time to develop. Google made that easy, but even crafting a Google search query that will give you the results you want is a skill. You’ll need to recognize when the AI is wrong. You’ll need to understand where AI is better than you and where its limitations are. Additionally, selecting which AI to use for certain tasks will be important.
Educators will adapt to AI availability. Just as Google search made it much easier for students to cheat, so will AI. That said, educators will develop teaching methods that both allow students to learn from AI and prevent students from using AI to cheat. Will verbal exams become a thing again? As an aside, I graduated from Georgia Tech’s OMSCS program back in 2018 (I think!). Ironically, one of the most difficult courses I took there was “Artificial Intelligence”. The final exam in this class was a take home exam that took me a week to complete. However, I am confident that OpenGPT could have solved all of the problems for me. So I think that AI will present challenges to online education.
I hope you enjoyed this post!