How ChatGPT will transform the IT industry

The revolutionary natural language processing model developed by OpenAI has unveiled a multitude of opportunities in transforming industries. At the same time, it has kicked off an existentialist angst among us all.  Thousands of articles headlined ‘whether ChatGPT will replace XXX industry’ surfaced in the past few months. If you asked me, the questions taking over the headlines are pseudo-problems, due to the fact that the power of ChatGPT and other AI tools are growing at an exponential rate everyday thanks to its self-learning capability.

On 22 March 2023, Elon Musk and dozens of tech leaders, professors and researchers had signed a letter published by the Future of Life Institute calling for AI labs to stop training the most powerful AI systems for at least six months as it is creating ‘profound risks to the society and humanity’. The letter questions, ‘Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?’ Some people still choose to believe that AI will not takeover jobs. Ironically, if you ask ChatGPT, it will consistently tell you that ChatGPT is not meant to replace human workers. However, this open letter signed by the experts in AI pleading for a pause in its development has shown how ignorant we are about this rapidly growing technology. The ChatGPT-4 released in March 2023, roughly one year after its predecessor ChatGPT-3.5 model has finished training, scores 150 points higher in SAT, is 40% more likely to produce accurate responses, and has other capabilities such as using visual prompts.

IT industry is just one of many that needs to critically re-assess their future. On 26 March 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation. The number sounds intimidating. Many jobs that exist today will be partially automated. It is time for a paradigm shift. How is it applied to the IT industry?

Until now, we have always understood a computer programmer’s core duties as communicating with machines, translating our human wishes into codes that computers could understand. Now, ChatGPT is not only capable of automating some mundane tasks such as writing codes, debugging codes, translating codes from one computer language to another, it is also capable of performing higher level tasks such as optimising codes to make it more efficient according to the performance metrics of your choice, testing the codes by writing and running test cases, recommending a software architecture based on large amount of data, etc.

With all these mundane tasks being taken over or compressed in time, programmers can now dedicate their headspace to strategic thinking and understanding business needs. It is likely that more programmers could become thought leaders or start up founders. Their fluency in technical languages gives them an edge for innovation.

While AI will take away jobs, it is sure to create new jobs too. A report by UK Economic PwC estimated that 7.2million jobs will be created through AI. Here are the three IT-related roles that will increase in demand:

1.Cybersecurity

There is a global shortage of 3.4 million workers in cybersecurity in 2022. The need for cybersecurity professionals increases when more people adopt generative AI. Cybercriminals can use generative AI to create convincing phishing emails, fake news and deepfakes. It can also use AI to automate attacks. When large amount of data was used to train AI models, more cybersecurity protocols needed to be in place and enforced.

2. AI and machine learning

With more companies adopting generative AI technologies, more AI specialists will be needed in developing and training AI models, integrating AI into existing systems, monitoring and maintaining AI models, managing data inputs, etc. A report in 2021 by Burning Glass predicted that AI-related job will increase by 71% over the following 5 years.

3. Cloud computing

The global cloud computing market size was valued at 405.65 billion in 2021, and is projected to grow fourfold to USD 1,712.44 billion by 2029. As AI requires a large amount of computing resources including storage, processing power, and memory to train and run models effectively, the adoption of AI will drive up demands for cloud computing specialists.