Two years ago, on November 30, ChatGPT burst onto the scene, sparking a global fascination with generative AI and transforming it into an innovation to watch for both consumers and technology professionals. Since then, ChatGPT has expanded and the wheels of AI regulation have begun to turn.
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 last year, OpenAI has:
- ChatGPT was expanded to new formats such as ChatGPT search and Canvas, the latter of which is designed, in part, to sit alongside an coding application.
- GPT-4o and OpenAI o1 presented, new flagship models.
- Partnered with Apple to support some features of Apple's built-in AI.
- Announced ChatGPT will remember previous conversations.
- ChatGPT search has been launched, marking OpenAI's bid to replace Google Search as the de facto portal to the rest of the internet.
- It rolled out advanced voice mode to select users in October, allowing them to speak to the AI out loud.
On October 3, OpenAI released Canvas, marking a major experiment in using ChatGPT.
“Making AI more useful and accessible requires rethinking how we interact with it,” the OpenAI team wrote in October upon the Canvas announcement. “Canvas is a new approach and the first major update to ChatGPT's visual interface since its launch two years ago.”
How ChatGPT has improved in 2024
Graham Glass, CEO of AI course creation platform Cypher Learning, noted how ChatGPT offers access to more sophisticated models now than in 2023.
“First of all, ChatGPT continues to improve,” he said in an interview with TechRepublic. “And it has become more sophisticated, which opens up additional opportunities to leverage that technology.”
Last year, Glass leveraged ChatGPT to brainstorm software designs and architectures. Asking the tech about best practices or design tradeoffs gives you “the corpus of all the designs that everyone has done on that particular topic,” he said.
“It's gotten smarter,” added Curt Raffi, chief product officer at Acrolinx, a company that uses AI to test content for whitepapers and other writing-heavy work. He noted the improved performance of GPT-4o as well as OpenAI o1.
Raffi also explained that people feel more comfortable using ChatGPT. Work with engineers who have gotten better at enabling ChatGPT in ways that express specific business logic.
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Glass likes that ChatGPT search provides current information and sees it as a time saver for tasks like product comparisons. It also uses advanced voice mode to chat with the AI out loud.
Overall, ChatGPT's additions over the last year have provided more options for people who want to use generative AI for technical work.
“The most significant way that generative AI assistants have changed programming and development over the last year is by allowing people with different levels of programming to participate in software development to deliver solutions to real-world problems,” Houbing said. Herbert Song, member of the Institute. of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said in an email to TechRepublic.
What ChatGPT can't do in 2024?
AI is not immune to errors. For Glass, coding with ChatGPT often involves back-and-forth dialogue, including “reminding” the AI of details it may have missed.
“Although I think it is much more reliable in terms of design [in 2024]still makes a lot of coding mistakes,” Glass said.
For example, Glass said on a recent task that ChatGPT needed 10 prompts to create a function in JavaScript correctly. This still saved you time, but shows that ChatGPT is still limited. He attributed this in part to ChatGPT being trained on a finite, albeit huge, corpus of code.
Filev noted that ChatGPT has become so reliable that people don't easily notice when it makes mistakes.
“It's getting so good that I started to let my guard down, and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing,” Filev said.
For many tasks, you started searching for physical fonts on Google Search or Perplexity AI before using ChatGPT. These might be better places to find reliable sources, he said, while ChatGPT is better for exchanging ideas.
Regulations could affect ChatGPT
Last year also revealed the limitations and possible regulation of ChatGPT. Raffi said his team is carefully addressing AI-generated code after a court case between the developers and GitHub Copilot. The developers alleged that GitHub Copilot violated intellectual property rights by using open source code.
Raffi noted that the commercial use of such code in markets remains somewhat uncertain, making AI applications in coding a cautious and exploratory process.
“Our intellectual property is in our code, and if we were suddenly open or exposed to lawsuits, we could erode the value of our company,” Raffi said.
How ChatGPT has affected early career developers
Over the past year, another key development has been ChatGPT's impact on early-career developers.
“Because this greatly improves efficiency for developers to focus on higher-order design and innovation, perhaps most importantly, the role of a developer dramatically changes from creators to overseers of AI-generated code.” Dheerendra Panwar, a senior fellow at IEEE, said in an email to TechRepublic. “Which brings us to a very important question: are we simplifying the art of coding?”
In some cases, junior developers may not be hired at all, as some tasks normally assigned to them are now handled by AI.
“These changes appear to be beneficial for senior programmers as they expand their role and importance,” Jen Stave, executive director of the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard University, wrote in an email. “Because junior developers often lack the expertise to spot problems like AI hallucinations or inaccurate results, this incredibly important role falls to senior programmers who now need to expand their responsibility to mitigate risks like computer-induced code errors. AI.”
In other cases, junior developers may be more proficient at rapid engineering than senior ones.
“For young programmers, the story is more complex,” Stave wrote. “Generative AI reduces your dependence on collaborative problem solving, encouraging more autonomous work. While this independence can speed up productivity, that may not be a good thing for humans who tend to derive mental health benefits from human interaction and collaboration.”
Andrew Filev, founder and CEO of Zencoder, an AI software development tools startup, explained that powering ChatGPT may seem like a different skill set. However, it reminded him how using Google Search was once a skill listed on resumes. Perhaps 2024 was the year ChatGPT began to affect the way tech professionals think about the portal to the rest of the Internet.
“It's becoming more and more an integral part of my daily life,” Filev said of ChatGPT. “It gives me a productivity boost, but it doesn't define me one way or another, right?”
ChatGPT Search and Canvas Offer New Form Factors
OpenAI's efforts to become a new portal to the rest of the Internet can be seen most clearly in ChatGPT search and Canvas.
Raffi said ChatGPT search didn't hold up very well against Google Search, lacking context and providing “pretty bad results.” However, he uses Canvas frequently.
“It's changing the way we think about AI and ChatGPT,” he said. “It's about introducing an application layer and making you think about AI APIs as the back end and more about the business logic behind everything. It encapsulates many of the confusing complexities of many editors.”
Because Canvas stores memories, you can reference previous changes to the code. Raffi called it a combination of application layer, back-end and business logic layer.
There will be many changes in the coming years.
2024 showed that AI can't do everything and that the rate of transformative use cases could be slowing. On the other hand, AI companies are training models to digest more and more data, including improving the models underlying ChatGPT. The way professionals interact with ChatGPT has changed since 2023 and will likely be different a year from now.
“Yes, there will be changes,” Filev said. He compared the rise of AI to the move from punched cards to software programming. “But I think developers are used to change.”
“Technology advances and we keep up to date, and I think it allows us to do much more and better,” he added. “And ChatGPT is one of the good examples of technologies that help us.”
