O’Reilly Tech Report: AI and Security Main Trends in 2024
Generative AI (Gen AI) has seen an unprecedented surge of interest among developers, with engagement in GPTs – a family of AI models – increasing 3,600% year over year.
O’Reilly’s annual Technology Trends for 2024 report reveals which technology tools are increasing in popularity and which are declining, enabling organisational leaders to stay informed and identify emerging trends that could shape their business strategies in the coming year.
While tied to the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the growth in GPT models is also a reflection of developers’ focus on building on top of the APIs for GPT and other language models.
As a result, natural language processing remains the most widely consumed AI topic and saw a significant usage uptick (195%). Related topics such as generative models and transformers also saw huge gains, rising by 900% and 325%, respectively. Prompt engineering, a topic that didn’t exist in 2022, has quickly emerged as a significant area of interest, garnering nearly the same level of attention as transformers.
Security a topic of interest for developers in the age of Gen AI
Security is another topic that saw serious interest gains among developers, particularly with the rise of Gen AI, with almost all related search topics showcasing growth from 2022 to 2023.
According to O’Reilly network security was the most widely used topic, experiencing 5% year-over-year growth, followed by governance (22% growth). Interest in application security topics rose 42%, and DevSecOps experienced one of the highest increases (30% growth) in usage among security topics, signalling a shift toward incorporating security throughout the software development process.
While mature programming languages like Python and Java continue to drive the most usage among programming topics on the O’Reilly platform, C++ saw the most impressive usage growth (10%), which is increasingly important as AI goes mainstream. Newer infrastructure-related languages also continued to gain popularity, including Rust (7.8% growth).
“This year marks a rare and genuinely disruptive time for the industry, as the emergence of Gen AI promises important changes for businesses and individuals alike,” said Mike Loukides, VP 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.”
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