AI Writing its own Code: Codex

 More on the Codex approach. How long until such methods take over most coding?   Sooner than we think I believe    Most useful to make sure coding approaches are as safe as possible.   Is that better than human coding?   Ultimately it will be. 

A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code. That's Good News for Humans   By The New York Times,  September 10, 2021

As soon as Tom Smith got his hands on Codex — a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs — he gave it a job interview.

He asked if it could tackle the "coding challenges" that programmers often face when interviewing for big-money jobs at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. Could it write a program that replaces all the spaces in a sentence with dashes? Even better, could it write one that identifies invalid ZIP codes?

It did both instantly, before completing several other tasks. "These are problems that would be tough for a lot of humans to solve, myself included, and it would type out the response in two seconds," said Mr. Smith, a seasoned programmer who oversees an A.I. start-up called Gado Images. "It was spooky to watch."

Codex seemed like a technology that would soon replace human workers. As Mr. Smith continued testing the system, he realized that its skills extended well beyond a knack for answering canned interview questions. It could even translate from one programming language to another.

From The New York Times    View Full Article  

Making Coding like Speaking?

 How easy is this to do without error?  

OpenAI Is Making Coding As Easy As Talking to a Smart Speaker  By Wired in CACM

A few weeks ago, I went to an office in the Mission District of San Francisco to get an advance peek at a computer program that promises to disrupt computer programming. I was visiting OpenAI, a company devoted to "artificial general intelligence" (as opposed to humans, who have, at least on good days, non-artificial general intelligence). Their latest creation is called Codex, and it writes computer code, in some instances very well.

I was impressed as OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman and his fellow cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, who is a key creator of Codex, took it through its paces in a live demo. They asked Codex to express some text, grab some images, make a web page, and put the page on the internet. Then, employing the casual language one might use in conversation, they built a simple game by grabbing web-based images of helicopters and getting them to fly across the screen and blast enemies. As the game took shape feature by feature, I realized I was viewing a transformation of the famous "flow state" that good coders feel when they get rolling. Until now that flow involved an intense inner dialog. Now it's more like a conversation with a robot companion.... 

OpenAI's latest creation, Codex, writes computer codein some instances very well.... 

From Wired

Copilot Assistant Coding

 Actually did this in the early days, with human co-pilots, but it never took off.  Now with secure code more of a necessity, could be useful.  This could drive closer to Lo-Code too.   How well can this work today?  Even flagging security dangers in patterns of code could be useful.  But how well can we recognize such patterns?  Following. 

OpenAI and GitHub Unveil New Copilot AI Assistant for Coding

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ in Voicebot.AI

A new virtual assistant created by OpenAI and GitHub will suggest code to software developers as they work. The new GitHub Copilot tool leverages an improved version of OpenAI’s popular GPT-3 language model called Codex to teach the AI how to collaborate in a coding project like a human partner.

AI COPILOT

Github Copilot takes the concept of natural language processing and applies it to programming languages. The idea is to imitate a “pair programmer,” when two developers simultaneously work on a coding project and comment and annotate each other’s work along the way. The AI theoretically takes the junior partner role in the endeavor, making its name entirely apropos. Copilot relies on OpenAI’s Codex model to understand what the programmer is doing and come up with suggestions. Like GPT-3, Codex is built on an enormous collection of data to teach an AI how to suggest a line or more of code. The AI learns from what suggestions the human user accepts or rejects, honing its understanding and ideally leading to better code ideas.  ... '