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I need your help. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around ChatGPT

8 points by complianceowl ↗ HN
Background: I work in Compliance and have for 8-years.

A while back, I saw that there was a need, in Compliance, for people who know data analytics and who can build out systems that prevent and detect corporate wrongdoing.

I decided to pursue a bachelors in Data Analytics for this reason. I have about a year and a half-ish left.

But my mind is having a hard time reconciling my pursuit of a data analytics bachelor's degree with the capabilities of ChatGPT. I keep reading real, legitimate stories of how ChatGPT was able to all-together replace programmers for projects like developing micro services, websites, etc.

I understand that programmers still need to validate the code, and I'm not saying I even understand to what degree programmers are being replaced, but I can't help but feel like my pursuit of a formal bachelor's degree or even continuing to learn data analytics and data engineering will be in vain in light of what feels like major overnight advances in AI.

I wholeheartedly will appreciate your thoughts, insights, and time!

Thank you, and God bless.

7 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] thread
bpiche
Don't be afraid of script kiddies. They have always existed and will continue to exist. Just keep pushing and work on the fundamentals - something most prompt engineers do not have a grasp of.
m1k3yboi
I would second that. Even the best prompt engineers could not do the mental gymnastics to read, comprehend and change the generated code. We are a long way from replacing programmers.
kykeonaut
As others mentioned, I believe that as long as there is a prompt to be written, there will be a need for domain experts to write them.

I think our jobs will switch to verifying what GPT-4 and co. are spewing. And yeah, that might get rid of those jobs that are just about mindlessly spewing out HTML. But there are already tools that do that like Wordpress :) Imho this is actually great, we will be able to focus on better, more interesting things, rather than on low level repetitive tasks. So, I think that developers' jobs won't go anywhere, unless you count a developer as a boilerplate factory.

sp332
GhatGPT gets lucky a lot. And it sounds confident all the time. So the times it happens to be right get publicized way more. I think eventually, people will learn what it’s really good at, and things will be less hyperbolic.
mitchellpkt
Anecdotally: I do a decent amount of DS work and use GPT to help me move faster through the mundane data tooling work like ingesting new file formats or updating schemas. This enables me to spend more of my time and energy on the interesting science parts (research, algo dev, experiments, etc). I don't see it as threatening the role, rather empowering it.

[usual disclaimers: LLMs hallucinate, never trust their output without review and testing, etc]