Microsoft has followed its 1 billion USD OpenAI investment in 2019 with a recent announcement of another 10 billion USD in the pipeline. In other words, things are only getting started for ChatGPT. Likewise, just about everybody in or around tech has an awareness of it at this stage.
Does ChatGPT and the associated technology have limitations & challenges? Does it create challenges? Of course it does – on all counts. Ethical, intellectual property, and academia related challenges to name but a few. And sometimes, it just gets things plain wrong.
Concern has also been expressed in my network regarding the future of the IT professional.
A quote that has been appearing alot in the context of ChatGPT discussions lately:
AI will not replace you. A person using AI will.
(If you know who originally coined this quote, please let me know).
In some ways though, this type of scenario is not new.
What do I mean?
Before the Google search engine launched in the late 90’s, there were IT professionals. As time passed, there were IT professionals who used Google, and IT professionals that didn’t. Likewise, the Google service improved. As more time passed, more and more IT professionals started using Google, to the point that it’s become pretty ubiquitous.
It will be the same trend for ChatGPT & and similar services.
In the beginning there will be (and are) IT professionals who use ChatGPT as an assistant.
And IT professionals who don’t.
But as time passes, more and more IT Pros will use it as an assistant e.g. to generate, debug, and explain code. As an example I’ve blogged about how we can use VS Code with ChatGPT integration when developing code for the Snowflake Data Cloud.
Other similar chatbots will spring up. Having issued a ‘code red’, Google is by no means out of the fight yet. And those chatbots will improve over time.
It’s not so much about whether ChatGPT will replace IT Pros, but more so how IT Pros will use ChatGPT (or equivalent) as an assistant.
This is how things will evolve in this context for the IT Professional.
© 2023 Dan Galavan.