AI can now write its own computer code: That's good news for humans

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 Smith, a seasoned programmer who oversees an AI start-up called Gado Images. “It was spooky to watch.”

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

Yet after several weeks working with this new technology, Smith believes it poses no threat to professional coders. In fact, like many other experts, he sees it as a tool that will end up boosting human productivity. It may even help a whole new generation of people learn the art of computers, by showing them how to write simple pieces a code, almost like a personal tutor. “This is a tool that can make a coder’s life a lot easier,” Smith said.

Codex, built by OpenAI, one of the world’s most ambitious research labs, provides insight into the state of artificial intelligence. Though a wide range of AI technologies have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, even the most impressive systems have ended up complementing human workers rather than replacing them.

Thanks to the rapid rise of a mathematical system called a neural network, machines can now learn certain skills by analysing vast amounts of data. This is the technology that recognises the commands you speak into your iPhone, translates between languages on services like Skype and identifies pedestrians and street signs as self-driving cars speed down the road.

About four years ago, researchers at labs like OpenAI started designing neural networks that analysed enormous amounts of prose, including thousands of digital books, Wikipedia articles and all sorts of other text posted to the internet. By pinpointing patterns in all that text, the networks learned to predict the next word in a sequence. When someone typed a few words into these “universal language models,” they could complete the thought with entire paragraphs. In this way, one system — an OpenAI creation called GPT-3 — could write its own Twitter posts, speeches, poetry and news articles.