AI Topics (ChatGPT, Copilot, and more) at DevOps Enterprise Summit Amsterdam!

We have a spectacular program planned for DevOps Enterprise Summit Amsterdam on 15-17 May.  As always, we will be featuring incredible experience reports from technology leaders from large, complex organizations across so many industry verticals.

However, there is likely no technology leader who hasn’t been thinking, even if just a little bit, on how things like ChatGPT, Google Bard, GitHub Copilot, and other AI tools will affect our profession: In the optimistic case, on how we should best use them to our advantage; in the pessimistic case, how software development disappears entirely.

To address this topic, we have made time for some really amazing presentations to get you up to speed (and if you’re like me, get excited, inspired, and have your mind blown).

Things I’ve Learned Lately About AI

Before I get into the AI topics that will be at the conference, I wanted to share a couple of quick things that I’ve learned in the last sixty days that have converted me from an absolute skeptic on AI to becoming an avid, excited learner and user.

• A friend told me that one of his portfolio companies was being acquired.  They asked ChatGPT something along the lines of, “Pretend like you’re the best M&A lawyer in the world; what are the top risks that I should be worried about?”  Apparently, the answer was better than the advice they got from their lawyer.
  
• Scott Prugh, GVP Engineering at UKG, wrote the following prompt, and was amazed at how good the answer was: “Create terraform that provisions a Google Compute Image”
  
• Another friend showed me this tweet where ChatGPT not only can generate an FFmpeg script to “extract the first 5 seconds of the video” — check out the video where this person uploads the video, and gets back the first five seconds!  (It spun up a VM somewhere and executed the FFmpeg command!!)  https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609?lang=en
  
• Dave Winer (widely known for helping create RSS) wrote about uploading decades of his writing into a service powered by OpenAI, which created a chatbot that allows you to ask it anything about what he’s written — he’s posted examples of things it was able to find that Google searches could not!  http://scripting.com/2023/04/03.html#a184926 

I would imagine that if you were skeptical like I was, some of these might make you say, “gosh, there is something very interesting happening in this space!”

Exciting Talks That We’re Featuring

I’m super excited that we’ll be bringing you some talks that will educate and inspire you, both as a technology leader and as someone who loves building things with technology!

• Patrick Debois, the godfather of DevOps and famous for coining the term “devops,” will be giving us a breathtaking whirlwind tour of his multiple years of exploring the frontiers of AI, showing what you can now do with text, code, audio, video, and so much more.
• Dr. Mik Kersten, CTO of Planview and author of Project to Product, will talk about a startling conversation with his longtime friend, Rod Johnson (inventor of the famous Java Spring framework), who predicted the end of coding as a profession as we know it in 5-10 years — he’ll talk about his own reflections as an AI skeptic to pondering the end of the software profession as we know it
• Dr. Stephen Magill, VP, Product Innovation at Sonatype, will present a rebuttal to Rod Johnson’s claim, arguing that with AI, we’ll need more software developers than ever, as opposed to no one needing them at all.
• Ignite talks! We’ll be doing a series of short 5-minute Ignite talks, where we’ve asked people to either show us something they’ve done with AI tools, or teach us something they’ve learned
• Fernando Cornago, Vice President, Digital Tech, adidas, in addition to presenting an experience report on the continuation of the DevOps journey at adidas, will also share how some teams across the organization are experimenting with AI to achieve business goals — what he shared with me (I’m so, so sorry for repeating this, but it’s so exciting) blew my mind.

Join us in Amsterdam

As you can see, we’re thrilled to showcase talks at DevOps Enterprise Summit about the impacts of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, etc.

And if you’re planning to attend the conference in Amsterdam, submit your proposal and ignite our audience with a 5-minute presentation and show off something you did or teach us something you think would be useful!

Register to attend DevOps Enterprise Summit Amsterdam to join us! Hope to see you there!

Bonus: Video Of Trying to Use ChatGPT to Write this Blog!

I’ve used ChatGPT mostly for fact finding and research. I’ve never tried using it for writing, but Jeff Gallimore has. It was great fun to learn what it can do, and limitations.

Here’s a video to explore how Jeff Gallimore, Ann Perry, Alex Broderick-Forster, and me seeing to what extent ChatGPT can help with writing this blog post.

We didn’t use any of the text it generated in this post, so I suppose it didn’t help as much as I had hoped. But I was impressed at the text it did generate. Reading what I wrote, it reinforced some text I had thought about writing, filled in a couple of conceptual blanks I hadn’t thought of, and likely accelerated the process of writing the text.

It was still fantastic to see what the limitations are; and I’d love to learn how to target specific rewrites of areas of the outline — this is something we couldn’t figure out how to do. (See my questions at the bottom of this document.)

Prompts used include:

• write a blog post for a conference about how technology leaders are spending time thinking about and discussing the uses of chatgpt. cover amazing things you can do with chatgpt. mention we have talks from experts and leaders about how they’re using chatgpt. and mentioned that we’ll have short demos of uses.
• Write an 800 word blog post with the following outline on the topic of why you should attend a conference about how ChatGPT and other AI will affect technology leaders.  The outline is as follows:
  • things I have learned that blew me away
  • exciting speakers that we’re featuring
  • ignite talks at the end, with speakers showing off what they built or something they learned and want to teach

We didn’t use any of the text from ChatGPT, but I felt like it made it faster for us to write the text (manually, the normal way, what a strange concept).

Questions I have — any help appreciated!

• how do you get ChatGPT to rewrite portions of the text? (I tried, “rewrite the second bullet so that it is 150 words”, but rewrote the whole thing”)

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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