In the past couple of years, AI has been taking the dev world by storm. Both for good and bad reasons.

GitHub CoPilot was launched late last year. While just recently, ChatGPT has been the talk of the town. Both have caused quite a stir, with a lot of developers fearing for their jobs.

Ok, once and for all, let's stop getting scared of AI. So far, the use cases are nowhere near the doomsday scenario that media and "tech influencers" are making them out to be.

In plain terms, here's how I look at both GitHub CoPilot and ChatGPT.

• GitHub CoPilot: Supercharged Code Autocomplete

• ChatGPT: Supercharged Conversational Search Engine

Most people have no idea how awesome these tools are! And finally, AI is being brought down even further into consumer-level products. Exciting times.

If there's someone who should be afraid of ChatGPT, it should probably be Google Search, as something is finally threatening their decades-old foothold on web search.

Google is looking into AI-powered conversational search. I'm very curious about what the progress is. OpenAI beat them to it! All I can guess is they've become victims of the large-org syndrome. (Or maybe it's a question we could ask ChatGPT?)

One potential problem with ChatGPT (and CoPilot) though is I don't think it owns all the data it's spitting out. There might be an issue of attribution there.

Another issue is that since there are no attribution links, lots of websites where this information is coming from might start losing out on web traffic, which is fundamentally the "currency" of the web.

Potential loss of web traffic = potential loss of revenue. Fewer eyeballs, less money.

I'm very eager to see how things play out. Meanwhile, I recently bit the bullet on GitHub CoPilot. Planning to share my experience here on the blog after the trial, and whether I would pay for it, or look into alternatives like TabNine.

Yes, CoPilot wasn't even the first one in the AI code completion space. But it turns out, being first in the market doesn't necessarily translate to success. That bodes well for Google Search, doesn't it?

How about you? What's your take on the recent hot advancements in consumer AI?