It’s no surprise that people have grown more interested in AI over the last year. The technology insights company O’Reilly has just published its annual trends report, in which it revealed just how much more interest people have these days.
According to the findings, interest in GPT and generative AI has grown 3,600% year over year. Interest in generative models grew 900%, transformers grew 325%, and natural language processing grew 195%.
The company also found that there’s been a growing interest in prompt engineering, which is a topic that hadn’t been tracked in 2022. It’s now considered to also be “a significant area of interest, garnering nearly the same level of attention as transformers.”
Moving beyond AI, security is another area that really increased in interest, particularly among developers. Network security, which is the most widely used of the topics studied, grew 5% in interest. Governance also saw a 22% increase in interest.
There was also a 42% increase in application security topics, with DevSecOps seeing the highest increase at 30%. According to O’Reilly, this is an indication that developers are shifting towards incorporating security throughout the development process.
Among programming languages, C++ saw a 10% increase in interest, which O’Reilly attributes to the increased interest in AI, and Rust saw a 7.8% increase.
And finally, the report also found that developers are trying to improve “soft skills,” such as project communications (23% growth), professional development (22%), and project management (13%).
“This year marks a rare and genuinely disruptive time for the industry, as the emergence of generative AI promises important changes for businesses and individuals alike,” said Mike Loukides, vice president of emerging technology content at O’Reilly. “Efficiency gains from AI do not, however, replace expertise. Our data signals a shift for programming as we know it, with consequences for skills, job prospects, and IT management. Now more than ever, upskilling will become essential to prepare for the new innovations in the coming year.”
