The new paradigm, programming with natural language

Probably the biggest game changer with using LLM-based AI assistants is that you’re able to interact with them using nothing but natural language. There’s no need to learn a programming language to get the response you need. This change constitutes a new paradigm in interacting with AI. We’re moving away from writing in specific languages for producing apps, data retrieval, or even how we produce images, presentations, and more to express at a high level what we want through a prompt.

Here is an example of things that are now possible to do using prompts, where it before needed considerably more effort:

• Programming: With a prompt, you express what app you want to build or what changes you want to make with the code.
• Image generation: Where you before needed a designer or artist, you can now generate via prompts.
• Videos: There are tools out there that, once given a prompt, will generate videos where an avatar reads out your written text.
• Text tasks: LLM-based AI assistants can generate emails, summarize large bodies of text, author interview ads, and much more; anything you can imagine with text really.

All these application areas mentioned above make it clear that LLM-based AI tools are useful not only to programmers and data scientists but numerous different professions.

Challenges and limitations

Is everything working perfectly at this point? AI assistants aren’t able to replace “you” just yet, and should be considered more of a “thinking partner.” Microsoft has even, through conscious naming, called their AI assistants “Copilots” where you’re clearly the pilot that sets out the direction. These tools can generate text and other modalities in seconds, but you need to verify the correctness. Often, the first response you get from a tool is something you need to iterate over. The good news is that it just takes seconds to redo the instruction.

An important thing to realize about AI assistants is that the more skilled you are at a certain topic, the more intelligent questions you can ask of it, and you’ll be able to better assess the correctness of the response.