DeepMind has created an AI capable of writing code to solve arbitrary problems posed to it, as proven by participating in a coding challenge and placing — well, somewhere in the middle. It won’t be taking any software engineers’ jobs just yet, but it’s promising and may help automate basic tasks.
The team at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is aiming to create intelligence in as many forms as it can, and of course these days the task to which many of our great minds are bent is coding. Code is a fusion of language, logic and problem-solving that is both a natural fit for a computer’s capabilities and a tough one to crack.
Of course it isn’t the first to attempt something like this: OpenAI has its own Codex natural-language coding project, and it powers both GitHub Copilot and a test from Microsoft to let GPT-3 finish your lines.
DeepMind’s paper throws a little friendly shade on the competition in describing why it is going after the domain of competitive coding:
Continue reading… “DeepMind’s AlphaCode AI writes code at a competitive level”Recent large-scale language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate code, and are now able to complete simple programming tasks. However, these models still perform poorly when evaluated on more complex, unseen problems that require problem-solving skills beyond simply translating instructions into code.
