Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade’s specialty isolating malicious software to ChatGPT see how it attacks computers.
It’s a obscure cybersecurity field. Which is why last month he hosted a weeklong seminar at . Johns Hopkins University where he taught students the complex practice . Of reverse engineering malware.
Many of the students had little to no. Coding background, but he was confident that a new tool would make . That less of a challenge: He asked students to sign up for ChatGPT.
“Programming languages are languages,” said Guerrero-Sade, an associate. lecturer at Johns Hopkins, referring to what the . ChatGPT software does. “So it’s become an amazing tool for prototyping things to get very fast, boilerplate code.”
ChatGPT opened to the public in November and gained millions of users who reveled in . Its uncanny ability to mimic almost any writing style, from Seinfeld . Scripts and limericks to religious texts and Shakespearean sonnets.
And while there’s been plenty of . Speculation about the ability to disrupt writing tasks, some computer . Scientists now wonder whether . Its most immediate impact will be on people whose tasks were once thought to be “future-proof.” YouTube and TikTok are already full of videos of people. Showing how they’ve found ways to perform ChatGPT tasks . That once required copious doses of coding prowess, from building . Entire websites to scraping information from the Internet.
Adrej Karpathy, former senior . Director of artificial intelligence at Tesla and founding member of . OpenAI, tweeted “The newest programming language is English.”
ChatGPT’s ability to imitate a particular author . Or style comes from the fact that the developers trained. It on available and public information spread across the Internet. Including vast repositories of published computer code and discussions of its troubleshooting. This gives ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, a similar program designed for coding. A rich foundation for how to complete all kinds of programming tasks. Said Grady Buch, IBM’s chief software engineering scientist.
“They have an open book — they’ve got the Internet at their disposal,” Butch said. “They’ve found answers to questions that have already been answered. So it becomes easier, faster.”
That won’t immediately put professional programmers out of a job, but it will speed them up, Butch said. Even before ChatGPT, coders who ran into problems often used Google to find solutions.
“It doesn’t change the way I do business. But it speeds things up for me,” he said. “It’s not revolutionary. It’s evolutionary.”
David Yu and two other engineers beat. Out 300 programmers in a competition in San Francisco. Last week to come up with the most interesting AI software program. His team’s project, titled “GPT is all you need for the backend. Used the chatbot to automate some of the essential but particularly . Unique parts of how apps work.
Yue says that while . Software engineers have been building these types of tools for years. The speed with which they’ve started recently has surprised him.
“there was no doubt about the inevitability. But the sheer speed at which it happened is quite amazing,” he said.
ChatGPT and related technologies are not perfect. They can introduce coding errors, and some . have questioned whether the code they generate is secure. But as long as they have human minds with some programming skills, this shouldn’t be a big problem. Siddharth Garg, a professor. Of computer engineering at New York University, said he and his . Colleagues recently completed a first-of-its-kind study in which he . Gave groups of students coding assignments, but only allowed . Some of them to use ChatGPT or Copilot. to help
“We did not see a significant difference in . The incidence of security bugs in human origin code . Versus code generated by CoPilot or ChatGPT,” Garg said.
“Yes, there are security bugs, but people make security bugs. At least we haven’t noticed a significant difference.”
What does all this mean for the many people who learn to code in the hopes that they’ll be in a lucrative career? Not everyone is pessimistic about their future.
“Generative AI can generate code, making it easier to build software and empowering. A software engineer,” wrote Hadi Partovi, CEO of tech education nonprofit Code.org. As part of a lengthy Twitter thread about the topic. “It will speed up software creation (and demand) and more people . Will be software engineers,” he concluded.
