Chat GPT: The Game-Changer in the Programming Industry?

As a programmer and computer enthusiast, I have been closely following the developments in the AI/ML industry, and one technology that has caught my attention is Chat GPT.

Well, everyone is talking about Chat GPT these days. Some people say it's perfect, other people say it's rubbish. I would like to offer a more or less balanced view.

What is Chat GPT and How Does it Work?

Chat GPT, short for Conversational Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is an AI technology that generates human-like responses to natural language input.

It is a type of language model that uses deep learning algorithms to understand the context of the input and generate relevant output.

Apparently, Chat GPT was trained on a large corpus of text data, such as books, articles, and conversations, to improve its language skills and generate more accurate responses.

Chat GPT works by breaking down the input text into smaller, more manageable pieces called tokens. These tokens are then fed into the model, which analyzes them and generates a probability distribution of the next token in the sequence. The model then selects the token with the highest probability and adds it to the output sequence. This process is repeated until the model generates a complete response to the input text.

If you would like to know more about how AI/ML works in general feel free to check this video:

Will Chat GPT Replace Programmers?

One of the boldest claims some people do about Chat GPT is whether it will replace programmers. The answer depends on whom you call "a Programmer" and what you call "Chat GPT".

A programmer

By programming, we usually mean writing some code to automate or perform some tasks. Similarly, a professional programmer is a person who does programming for money. This is, however, a rather unhelpful definition.

Programming can be something as simple as writing some code to do something once and as complex as creating a new AI itself, while making sure it can still properly run on one's smartwatch.

Chat GPT and other AI solutions are already quite capable of doing the simplest programming tasks. There're some promising "low-code" or "no-code" solutions that can take business requirements in some form and provide one with some working software.

A Chat GPT

By Chat GPT people can mean two very different things: a preview model which is available for everyone to try now and the technology this model is powered.

The preview model itself was never trained to do one particular task, instead, it was trained to do everything. This leads to two conclusions:

• Chat GPT preview model wasn't trained and designed for replacing programmers
• It is possible to Chat GPT train technology to do programming and only programming. And I'd say I would expect some very impressive results.

So is it going to replace programmers?

This technology is definitely going to change the programming job market landscape. I would think that it will lead to:

• Increased demand for ML specialist
• Increased demand for infrastructure specialists (it has to be run somewhere, right?)
• Lowered demand for lower-skilled programming jobs (freelancers might be the ones affected the most)
• People who are ignoring and not using AI-assistance tools may see their relative productivity drop significantly.

Conclusion

Chat GPT and other similar technologies have the potential to assist programmers in their work and reduce the time and effort required for mundane programming tasks.

For example, Chat GPT can be used to generate boilerplate code, suggest code improvements, and provide debugging assistance. This can free up programmers to focus on more challenging and creative aspects of programming.

Feel free to check this video if you want to see some concrete examples of how you can utilize Chat GPT in your day-to-day coding work: