O’Reilly, the premier source for insight-driven learning on technology and business, today announced the findings of its annual Technology Trends for 2024 report, which provides data-driven insights into the most popular technology topics consumed by the 2.8 million users on its online learning platform. Each year, this usage data reveals which technology tools are increasing in popularity and which are declining, enabling organizational leaders to stay informed and identify emerging trends that could shape their business strategies in the coming year.
The 2024 report revealed an unprecedented surge of interest in generative AI among developers, with topic engagement in GPTs—a family of artificial intelligence models—increasing 3,600% year over year. While tied to the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the growth 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 is another topic that saw serious interest gains among developers, with almost all related search topics showcasing growth from 2022 to 2023. 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, signaling 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).