For years and years I have been telling people something along the lines of “it used to be that you had to write books to share ideas that change the world, now it’s time to write software”.
Well… we might be back to books after all.
I have been spending a lot of my time playing and working with OpenAI tools, both ChatGPT and their excellent API. The more I get comfortable with this technology, the more I appreciate the ability it has to interpret even the smaller nuances of human language.
I use ChatGPT a lot to generate Python code. I don’t have enough programming skills to write my own software, but I have been explaining to other people what I wanted for more than 30 years. The ability of GPT4 to understand my explanation and generate code that I can then run to solve whatever I’m trying to solve is just amazing.
The fact that at the end of my long chats I have to copy and paste the code to get it to run in my specific context is just a matter of applying some integration glue (ChatGPT already has a code interpreter built in), meaning that we are just a few steps away to be able to program computer in English (or Italian, Hindi, etc).
On top of this there’s the training part.
Recently I copied and pasted an API documentation page into ChatGPT and asked to write a script which would interact with those API and perform a simple task. The script didn’t run correctly at the first try, it took about 20 minutes to get there, but were are almost there. I don’t need to learn things, I can get GPT to understand them and then help me get to my goals.
It’s a bit more complicated than copy and paste, but the same can be done with whole books or entire libraries. You can turn books to training material for AI and then use the AI to apply the knowledge in the book.
So forget software… write books!