ChatGPT has been making waves in the field of natural language processing. OpenAI’s conversational chatbot has immense potential as a disruptive technology, with some predicting it usurping Google as the premier search engine in the near future. It has already become a popular tool for businesses to save time and money doing written language tasks.

Among ChatGPT’s many capabilities lies one that really spoke to us: the ability to return code from normally-worded English prompts. This allows people with a non-technical background to create software without even touching a line of code – something software outsourcing companies have been doing for years.

This raises the question: can Software Outsourcing as an industry be replaced completely with ChatGPT in the near future?

ChatGPT3’s capabilities

First, ChatGPT’s strengths. ChatGPT is a language model trained on a massive amount of data and, as a result, can generate human-like responses to a wide range of questions and prompts. This makes it an ideal tool for automating customer support and other tasks that involve written language.

As Rikkeisoft’s software developers experimented with ChatGPT, they found that it is a powerful companion for their job thanks to its ability to:

• Create code suggestions: ChatGPT can suggest how to code next based on the developer’s input, saving them time and effort.
• Assist in bug detection: ChatGPT can assist in finding and squashing bugs in the developer’s code.
• Assist in research: Developers can quickly ask ChatGPT to define and explain anything they encounter while working, be it new terms, libraries, functions, or whatever you can think of.
• Evaluate code: Developers can run their code through ChatGPT for feedback on how to make it more efficient, easier to read, etc.

Many startups have chosen to use ChatGPT alongside other generative AIs as assistants, choosing to preemptively freeze hiring altogether, as reported by Sifted. This decision is not without reason: in the same article, a startup founder develops everything himself with ChatGPT as a personal coding assistant.

ChatGPT’s limitations

As impressive as it is, it’s important to remember that ChatGPT is still a machine and can’t think critically or creatively as a human would. Due to this alone, it cannot replace humans in an environment that requires heavily on personal experience and creative thinking like software development.

Furthermore, ChatGPT’s programming abilities are also very limited. As written above, the most it can do for developers are suggestions, assistance, and code polishing, due to many limitations of the chatbot:

• It cannot write complete programs, requiring a developer to write and finish the code.
• It cannot find and squash every bug in the code due to the lack of an execution and test environment.
• Its ability to directly interact with code environments like Integrated Development Environments and terminals is nonexistent.
• It cannot give detailed information about implementation, only advice and suggestions.

Mr. Dang Thai Hoa, CEO of Rikkei AI (Rikkeisoft’s subsidiary for AI research and development), noted that in its current state, ChatGPT could only help developers at the most basic level. Until OpenAI develops the chatbot further and/or releases a version specializing in software development, developers will not lose their place in the job market, Mr. Hoa stressed.

Another argument against ChatGPT replacing software outsourcing is the flexibility factor. IT Outsourcing solutions can be tailored to the specific needs of a business and can be scaled up or down as needed. This means businesses can work with IT outsourcing companies to create solutions tailored to their unique needs and can grow and change as their business evolves.

ChatGPT’s credibility is also a point of discussion between developers. As it was trained with a huge database of available information on the internet, it is unavoidable that false information was fed to the chatbot, generating wrong answers to users’ questions. Because of this, the users must be knowledgeable enough to do their research and compare it with ChatGPT’s answers for the best results.

Conclusion

While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it can’t replace IT Outsourcing companies in the near future. IT Outsourcing companies have the expertise and experience needed to create custom software solutions for businesses that are much more flexible and scalable than ChatGPT. At Rikkeisoft, developers are constantly researching how the chatbot can improve their efficiency in software development rather than worrying about being replaced.

 If you are thinking of creating highly customizable software for you and/or your business, IT outsourcing should still be a major contender for your consideration.