AI/ML skills are in high demand

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The digital skills gap continues to exist, leaving an increasing number of employees unprepared for continued digital transformation across businesses and business sectors around the world. And now the lack of artificial intelligence is particularly acute, with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and ChatGPT growing in popularity recently. According to a recent survey by analytics firm SAS, 63% of decision makers said AI and machine learning (ML) were the biggest skill gaps.

With the release of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, and news of similar projects underway by Google, Meta, and others, natural language processing (NLP), designed to help machines make sense of text and spoken words, is at the forefront of AI. I decided to stand in research. The ChatGPT celebrity has sparked his interest in NLP and deep learning, and that interest is likely to grow further as new generative AI tools emerge that can be used in a variety of business applications.

Growing interest in the potential of AI and ML tools follows findings from O’Reilly’s recent 2023 Technology Trends Report, which surveyed the most popular technology topics used by 2.8 million users of O’Reilly’s online learning platform. It is also clear from By analyzing what platforms users are learning about each day, this report identifies trends in technology and the business environment that could shape the coming year.

Tracking these trends is important, especially as more organizations turn to reskilling and upskilling efforts to keep their employees abreast of trends. A SAS survey found that 75% of decision makers say staff training and upskilling are the most important levers. to fill the skill gap. As the use of low-code and no-code tools grows, implementing training becomes more important.

Source: O’Reilly Media’s 2023 Technology Trends Report

Further research conducted by O’Reilly found that training (34%) is the biggest pain point for developers working with new tools, followed by ease of use (12%). These tools are increasingly his AI-based, but not always simple. Skills required to use them include analytical thinking, testing, and debugging.

Natural language processing is key

A clear sign of ChatGPT’s impact is the interest expressed by O’Reilly users in NLP, with the highest year-over-year growth at 42%, followed by deep learning at 23%. NLP has many uses, from automated chat servers to code generation and authoring tools, so it’s no surprise that it’s attracting interest. Developers are also increasingly searching for content related to Transformers, the AI model that helped advance NLP, further reflecting the influence of GPT-3 and ChatGPT. Interest in NLP and deep learning is only growing as the potential for these services grows and new projects emerge.

Chatbots are “victims” of the growing interest in NLP and deep learning. Usage fell by 5.8% year-over-year. This result may seem counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense given the significant impact that the release of GPT-3 had on everything before it seemed outdated. It’s suitable.

The future of ChatGPT will depend on how it and its related services become paid services and commercialized as Microsoft and Google work towards their own chat-based search tools.

AL and ML tools take center stage

Developers and researchers also continued to show interest in Scikit-learn. Scikit-learn is a relatively old but actively maintained tool with the most popular libraries. Usage increased by 4.7% from the previous year.

Source: O’Reilly Media’s 2023 Technology Trends Report

Overall usage of PyTorch and TensorFlow is about on par with Scikit-learn’s usage (PyTorch is slightly higher), but the two may be heading in different directions. PyTorch currently has 20% growth momentum, while TensorFlow is down 4.8%. Meanwhile, Keras, a front-end library that uses TensorFlow, dropped 40%. But the real winners are the public programming APIs for ChatGPT, Bard, and other language models. These APIs are already spawning a new generation of AI-driven applications.

Another notable development was the declining interest in MLOps and a 4% drop in usage. MLOps focuses on streamlining the process of bringing ML models into production and following up by maintaining and monitoring them. This is likely to play a key role in integrating AI and ML applications into other IT application deployments.

However, MLOps is still immature at this point and requires version control, testing and deployment tools. DevOps teams need to test, code, release, and monitor software more efficiently, but these issues are just beginning to be solved, so expect that process to be gradual.

Data Engineering Shows Its Value

The growing interest in AI does not obscure the fact that categories of data that encompass a wide range of topics, including AI, are still of great importance in the minds of technology professionals. Data engineering, which deals with storing and distributing data at scale, is by far the leading theme, growing 35% year over year. Data engineering includes tasks such as moving data to the cloud, building pipelines to retrieve and send data to application software, and solving problems caused by siled data within different organizations. It is included. All of this enables companies to optimize their data for ease of use, a key endeavor for many organizations, so the growing interest is not surprising.

In fact, AI wouldn’t be possible without data engineering. The data engineering required to build something like GPT-4 is unbelievable, but even smaller projects require organizations to gather data to help train AI. requires extensive data engineering.

Source: O’Reilly Media’s 2023 Technology Trends Report

Cloud skills in high demand

Cloud computing continues to grow, and organizations are making hiring cloud experts a top priority. According to Indeed’s 2021 jobs data, the percentage of cloud computing jobs per million people increased by 42% from 2018 to 2021. Some cloud experience seems to be a basic requirement for software developers and engineers.

AWS remains the most popular cloud, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which together account for 97% of content usage for cloud platforms. The puzzling thing is that all three providers showed a slight (probably slight) decrease in usage, with AWS down 3.8%, Azure down 7.5%, and Google Cloud down 2.1%. Cloud certifications followed a similar pattern, with AWS losing the most certifications, followed by Azure and Google Cloud, each with year-over-year declines.

While usage of content on specific cloud providers has decreased, interest in other cloud computing topics has increased. The most popular ones included cloud migration (45% growth), cloud service model (41% growth), and hybrid cloud (28% growth). These results may indicate an organization’s growing cloud maturity. After the early stages of adoption, organizations may begin to focus on higher-level issues such as full-blown cloud migrations rather than individual clouds. Despite the “cloud return” talk, it’s clear that interest in the cloud is still growing. The 2023 Technology Trends Report states that Linux is a key factor. If not yet, cloud computing will be an important factor in the near future.

lead your business to long-term success

Usage data from O’Reilly’s platform clearly shows that technology tools are growing (or declining) in popularity. Signs of important trends can be seen. Some are completely new, while others are continuations of trends that started years ago. Focusing on these trends can give business her leaders an edge and an edge in the year ahead and beyond as they work to reskill and upskill their workforce in the areas that will most impact their companies. You can set yourself up for success.

About the Author: Mike Loukides is VP of Emerging Technology Content at: O’Reilly Media. He has edited many acclaimed books on technical subjects not related to Windows programming. He is particularly interested in programming languages, Unix and what is now called Unix, and system and network administration. Mike is the author of System Performance Tuning and co-author of Unix Power Tools and Ethics and Data Science. Most recently, he’s written about data and artificial intelligence, ethics, the future of programming, and whatever else sounds interesting. He is also a pianist, amateur radio operator and bird lover.You can contact Mike on Twitter @mikeloukides And even on LinkedIn.