Adapt Or Pivot - The AI Arms Race Is Underway

It's the epitome of "water cooler chat" at the moment. Can you recall a day that's gone by recently where ChatGPT hasn't been mentioned in passing? 🤔

I can't...

The recent surge in availability of cutting-edge AI tools has pushed the tech industry into a state of flux 🌪 Some have moved to adopt AI tooling to augment existing processes and boost efficiency, while others have pivoted their entire business/product to leverage forms of AI.

A topic of heated discussion recently has been the highly anticipated announcement from Google in response to the astronomical rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT platform 🦄 Only a couple of days ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Bard - an AI to rival OpenAI's offering. Amusingly, the announcement contained a demonstration video which depicted Bard outputting inaccurate information 🤦‍♂️ (https://twitter.com/IsabelNAngelo/status/1623013720011194368). Though I digress...

It's unreal to watch it all unfold.

The reality is that, used with some forethought, AI tools can be insanely effective. I personally find myself leveraging AI tooling to carve away portions of the daily tedium quite frequently - and for that, it's bloody brilliant 💯 Here are some that I use often:

GitHub Copilot ⚡

I started to see a lot of chatter around Copilot a long while ago, but never went digging to take a closer look. I heard it was a crazy new tool that allowed you to Pair Program with an AI. Sounded too good to be true. A couple of months ago I took the plunge and signed up to use it and while it is exactly as awesome as it sounds, I find myself using it mostly to jog my memory about how to write something that I haven't in a while (I frequently juggle a heap of different languages and frameworks, so this is invaluable to me).

Midjourney 🌈

I cannot express how mind-blowing it was to dive into Midjourney for the first time. I'd previously spent hours messing around with DALL-E 2 and been amazed at the results, but when I discovered Midjourney for the first time, I lost myself in the world of text-to-image prompts. These days, I still use it for fun, but also for giving my blog posts a splash of colour as they tend to become a wall of text more often than not.

OpenAI ChatGPT 💬

I find copy written by ChatGPT to be super identifiable and lacking a linguistic dimension that I can't quite put my finger on. That said, it's damned fun - no denying that. In my case, I've found that at the end of a long day, when the mind grows weary and sentenced don't flow freely (or coherently), it's been useful to throw disparate thoughts through ChatGPT to form into something more legible come the next day.

How are AI tools affecting your day-to-day? What are your favourite AI tools? 🤖