ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users in less than a week and it is sparking a revolution in tech
What if you could pair program with a very senior engineer anytime you want? Or quickly debug complex parts of your code? ChatGPT is the best tech companion that any software engineer could ask for. Initially designed to offer a human like dialogue driven AI conversations, engineers soon realized they can leverage this product by OpenAI in a much bigger capacity.
Github Copilot by Microsoft was released last year and it quickly became a sensation in the world of programmers and in some cases increased their productivity by 40%. If Copilot was a strong AI-driven code autocomplete, you can think of ChatGPT as a human-like tech guru by your side.
You can use ChatGPT to experiment with 3rd party integrations, ask it to create code blocks for different scenarios and way more. For each session, the AI will learn from its previous answers too, so you could gradually enhance a raw answer by giving it consequential prompts.
Take a look at a real example of ChatGPT result from this prompt:
- Create a new module in an existing NodeJS application
- In this module, create a Discord bot to download youtube videos as an audio file and store it in DropBox.
- The program will use these packages from NPM library (discord.js, ytdl-core, dropbox).
- Assume all the credentials are available as environment variables.
Does this all mean that Google and StackOverflow will have serious contenders?
We’ve trained ChatGPT to interact a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
~ Sam Altman, OpenAI
ChatGPT as an education and productivity tool
ChatGPT can be used for many purposes and one of them is to learn programming. It allows you to get started quickly, learn the basics, and move onto more complicated tasks with ease.
So far, users have compared the technology to Google because it is capable of providing descriptions, answers and solutions to complex questions including ways to write code, and solve layout problems and optimization queries. It could also be useful for content generation of websites, customer service responses & recommendations and chatbot creation.
How about the AI bias?
ChatGPT does a god job to flag sensitive questions. But in some cases users were able to bypass the filters with simple tricks. Currently users need to click on “thumbs down” to reject an answer that the AI generated. But this can pose some serious problems if programs blindly rely on ChatGPT as a source of artifacts.
Look at the astonishing results below that Steven t. Piantadosi generated from ChatGPT:
Conclusion
ChatGPT can be seen as a the greatest innovation of the year so far when it comes to learning and writing code. It combines the best features of chatbots and AI frameworks, and this is probably just the beginning… However, some questions remain unanswered:
Will it replace google?
Will it be a substitute for education?
Is it a threat for a programmer’s career?
Try it out yourself on that link!: https://chat.openai.com/auth/login
