TechRepublic asked tech professionals how their work with ChatGPT has evolved both personally and within the broader tech industry.
New features introduced in 2024
Over the past year, OpenAI has:
- Expanded Chat GPT Chat in newer formats like GPT Search and Canvas, the latter of which is designed, in part, to sit alongside coding applications.
- GPT-4o and OpenAI o1, unveiled new flagship models.
- Partnered with Apple to support some of Apple’s onboard AI features.
- Announced ChatGPT will remember previous conversations.
- Released. Find Chat GPT.marking OpenAI’s bid to replace Google Search as the de facto portal to the rest of the Internet.
- Advanced Voice mode was rolled out to select users in October, allowing users to speak to the AI out loud.
On October 3, OpenAI launched. The canvasMarking a great experience in using ChatGPT.
“Making AI more useful and accessible requires a rethinking of how we interact with it,” the OpenAI team wrote at the Canvas announcement in October. “Canvas is a fresh approach and the first major update to ChatGPT’s visual interface since we launched two years ago.”
How ChatGPT has improved in 2024
Graham Glass, CEO of AI course building platform Cipher Learning, noted how ChatGPT provides access to more sophisticated models now than in 2023.
“First of all, ChatGPT keeps getting better,” he said in an interview with TechRepublic. “And it’s become more sophisticated, which opens up additional opportunities to leverage this technology.”
Over the past year, Glass has leveraged ChatGPT to keep software designs and software architectures in mind. Asking technology about best practices or design trade-offs brings him “a corpus of all the designs that everybody has done on that particular topic,” he said.
“It’s gotten smarter,” added Kurt Reffey, chief product officer at Acrolinx, a company that uses AI to proof content for technical documents and other writing-heavy jobs. indicated better performance. GPT-4oas well as OpenAI o1.
Rafi also explained that people have become more comfortable using ChatGPT. He works with engineers who have developed ChatGPT in ways that express specific business logic.
See: First meeting of International Network of AI Safety Institutesheld this week, aimed at managing the risks of advanced AI.
Glass likes that ChatGPT search provides up-to-date information, calling it a time-saver for tasks like product comparisons. He also uses advanced voice mode to chat out loud with the AI.
Overall, the addition of ChatGPT over the past year has provided more options for those looking to use generative AI for technical work.
“The most important way that generative AI assistants have changed programming and development over the past year is by empowering people at various levels of programming to solve real-world problems in software development,” said Hubing Herbert Song, fellow at the institute. To be able to engage.” of electrical and electronics engineers, said in an email to TechRepublic.
What can’t ChatGPT do in 2024?
AI is not immune to mistakes. For Glass, coding with ChatGPT often involves a back-and-forth dialogue, including “reminding” the AI about details it may have overlooked.
“Whereas I think it’s a lot more reliable when it comes to design. [in 2024]it still makes a lot of coding mistakes,” Glass said.
For example, Glass said of a recent task that it took ChatGPT 10 prompts to correctly generate a function in JavaScript. This still saved him time, but it shows that ChatGPT is still limited. This is partly due to ChatGPT being trained on a limited, albeit voluminous, corpus of code.
Filev pointed out that ChatGPT has become so reliable that people can’t easily notice when they make a mistake.
“It’s been getting so good that I’m starting to let my guard down, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Fileo said.
For many tasks, he started finding difficult sources with Google Search or Perplexity AI before using ChatGPT. They may be better places to find reliable sources, he said, while ChatGPT is better for brainstorming.
Regulations may affect ChatGPT.
The past year has also revealed ChatGPT’s limitations and potential regulation. Rafi said his team is treating AI-generated code with caution following a court case between developers and GitHub Copilot. The developers alleged that GitHub Copilot violated intellectual property rights by using open source code.
Commercial use of such code in markets is somewhat uncertain, making coding AI applications a cautious and exploratory process, Rafi noted.
“Our IP is in our code, and if we were suddenly exposed or litigated, we could devalue our company,” Rafi said.
How ChatGPT Has Impacted Early Career Developers
Over the past year, another important development has been the impact ChatGPT has had on early career developers.
“Because it greatly improves the ability for developers to focus on high-order design and innovation, perhaps more importantly, the role of a developer,” said Dhirendra Panwar, senior member of the IEEE. There is a rapid shift from creators to custodians of AI-generated code.” Email TechRepublic “Which brings us to a very important question: Are we diminishing the art of coding?”
In some cases, junior developers may not be hired, as some of the tasks normally assigned to them are now being handled by AI.
“These changes appear to be beneficial to senior programmers because they increase their role and importance,” Jane Steve, executive director of Harvard’s Digital Data Design Institute, wrote in an email. “Since junior developers often lack the skills to detect problems such as AI hallucinations or incorrect results, this incredibly important role falls to senior programmers who now have AI-induced code errors. Such as the need to widen our responsibility to mitigate risks.”
In other cases, junior developers may be more adept at quick engineering than seniors.
“The story is more complicated for junior programmers,” Steve wrote. “Generative AI reduces their reliance on collaborative problem-solving, promoting more autonomous work. While this independence can speed up productivity, it may not be a good thing for humans who Mental health benefits from human interaction and cooperation.
Andrew Filio, founder and CEO of AI software development tool startup Zencoder, explained that prompting ChatGPT seems like a different skill set. However, it reminded him of how using Google search was once a skill listed on resumes. Perhaps 2024 was the year ChatGPT began to influence how tech professionals think about portals on the rest of the Internet.
“It’s becoming more and more an integral part of my day,” Filev said of ChatGPT. “It gives me a productivity boost, but it’s not defining me in any way, right?”
Chat GPT Search and Canvas offer new form factors.
OpenAI’s efforts to become a new portal to the rest of the Internet can be clearly seen in ChatGPT Search and Canvas.
Rafi said that ChatGPT search is not very well maintained compared to Google search, lacks context and provides “pretty bad results”. However, he often uses canvas.
“It’s changing the way we think about AI and ChatGPT,” he said. “It’s introducing an application layer and forcing you to think about AI APIs and more of the business logic behind it. It would have removed a lot of the complexity that was causing a lot of confusion in a lot of editors.” is
Because Canvas stores memories, it can refer to previous changes in code. Rafi describes it as a combination of application layer, backend and business logic layer.
There will be many changes in the coming years.
2024 showed that AI can’t do everything, and the rate of change use cases can be low. On the other hand, AI companies are training models to digest more and more data, including optimizing models under ChatGPT. How professionals interact with ChatGPT has changed since 2023 and will likely look different a year from now.
“Yes, there will be changes,” Fileo said. He compared the rise of AI to the shift from punch cards to software programming. “But I think developers are used to the changes.”
“Technology moves forward and we keep up with it, and I think it allows us to do a lot more and better,” he added. “And ChatGPT is a good example of technologies that help us.”