The Kenyan Scholar

Investor and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen famously said in 2011 that "Software is eating the world." By this, he meant that software firms were gaining control over traditionally analog sectors of the economy. The movie-going and video-rental industries were shaken up by Netflix. As a result of Apple and Spotify, CDs are now obsolete. Amazon was primarily a software corporation that disrupted conventional retail, despite the fact that it shipped actual things from warehouses. Cars themselves were progressively becoming mobile computer terminals.

The issue of "why software is taking so damn long to finish eating" still persists after more than a decade. It has been stated that if software wasn't so costly to develop, it would be used much more extensively. OpenAI has now released ChatGPT. ChatGPT is low-cost, highly effective software that has the potential to shake up many different markets. It can compose any kind of text, from promotional copy to news pieces to legal briefs, and answer any query imaginable. It may also be used to supercharge preexisting applications.

For instance, Einstein, Salesforce's virtual assistant, now has ChatGPT integration. The chatbot may offer an overview of the organization, locate relevant content material, and write a custom email for a sales representative when they are assigned a new customer. The email should then be less formal if necessary.

The ChatGPT feature, introduced by Instacart, recommends a recipe, converts it into a shopping list, and automatically populates the necessary goods into your shopping cart. Put simply, ChatGPT is a highly flexible piece of software. It's accessible to everybody, but it takes practice to create the best prompts. Because of this, a new position, "Prompt Engineer," has emerged for those who are skilled in creating such prompts. Even though they didn't study computer science in college, these English majors are revolutionizing the IT industry.

When you realize that the chatbot software may be used to generate other software, the magic reaches a whole new level. Computer code is a kind of writing, and chatbots produce it. Someone may now create their own program by giving instructions to ChatGPT. Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and formerly the head of AI at Tesla, recently said, "The hottest new programming language is English."

The repercussions might be quite significant. It is a watershed moment for the software business when everyone may create their own programs for next to nothing, with as little effort as speaking or writing words. This is akin to when microchips and internet access first became commonplace and set off a wave of revolutionary new ideas.

ChatGPT is still in its infancy as a programming language, but users have already used it to create basic programs that highlight text or generate a random list of names. One programmer used ChatGPT to create an app that connected his smartphone to the service. Naturally, chatbots have significant limits and often make blunders at this early level. There may also be certain kinds of programming that AI will never be able to do.

Now picture a future where anybody, instead of needing to hire pricey software developers, can create a basic app by writing a few suggestions in plain English. This is the pinnacle of making software accessible to the masses. And even if some software still has to be written by people, that number will decrease.

Now picture a future where anybody, instead of needing to hire pricey software developers, can create a basic app by writing a few suggestions in plain English. It represents the peak of software democratization. And even if some software still has to be written by people, that number will decrease.

Github and OpenAI released Copilot, an AI tool designed to assist developers, in June 2021. It makes coding suggestions much as a smartphone does with words or an email client does with replies. Github reports that 46% of all code is being written with the aid of the Copilot tool. As it becomes less difficult and more affordable to write code, the availability of programmers will increase dramatically. When asked about the rise of software in the workplace in 2017, Nvidia's CEO replied, "Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software."

In June 2021, Github and OpenAI introduced Copilot, an AI tool that works alongside programmers. It suggests code the way your phone suggests the next word, or your email service suggest a reply. According to Github, developers are finding Copilot so helpful that it is writing an average of 46% of their code. Programming is quickly becoming a lot easier, which means cheaper, which means much more plentiful. In 2017, the CEO of chipmaker Nvidia said, “Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.”

That future is starting to come into view, and it could transform society in ways we cannot even fathom today.