Will ChatGPT replace developers?

Which professions are threatened by ChatGPT? Will ChatGPT replace developers?

In December 2022, a tool appeared that made many professionals shudder: ChatGPT. First of all, because it's free (at first), accessible to the general public and very easy to use. Also, its ability to communicate like a real human being amazes every user.

ChatGPT can write a LinkedIn post as easily as identifying code bugs or coding an application. Yes, yes, you heard me right. Maybe that's why many are worried about ChatGPT's impact on the developer profession.

Rest assured, you're not the only one who feels helpless when faced with this tool that supposedly knows how to do everything. This fear is even greater among young people in the process of choosing a career path, or those undergoing professional retraining, who no longer dare to take up the profession of IT developer, for fear of making the wrong choice and finding themselves out of a job.

So, the question is: do developers still have a place in this far too advanced world? You've come to the right place, and that's what this article is all about. Spoiler alert: the developer profession is far from disappearing!

What is ChatGPT?

Before getting to the nitty-gritty of the subject, we need to understand this technology, which seems to be threatening the profession of developers.

ChatGPT is a model of conversational intelligence, capable of chatting with you like a human, regardless of your level of technicality. It was created and developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company founded in 2015 by tech greats Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. OpenIA's stated aim is to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of mankind (to be put into perspective, depending on usage).

The name ChatGPT comes from the combination of the terms “chat”, meaning “conversation”, and ‘GPT’, meaning “predictive language transduction model”. ChatGPT is therefore based on an architecture known as GPT (pre-trained generative transformer). Four generations of GPT exist: today, ChatGPT is based on the GPT-4 architecture.

But how does GPT artificial intelligence work?

This famous GPT is based on a neural network system. We'll explain.

ChatGPT is an IT tool that generates coherent content (text, images, or computer code) in response to a supplied text. To do this, this tool was confronted with a large volume of data (very large), which enabled it to learn how to arrange words correctly.