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.
Yet after several weeks working with this new technology, Mr. 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 of code, almost like a personal tutor.
“This is a tool that can make a coder’s life a lot easier,” Mr. Smith said.
About four years ago, researchers at labs like OpenAI started designing neural networks that analyzed 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.
Much to the surprise of even the researchers who built the system, it could even write its own computer programs, though they were short and simple. Apparently, it had learned from an untold number of programs posted to the internet. So OpenAI went a step further, training a new system — Codex — on an enormous array of both prose and code.
The result is a system that understands both prose and code — to a point. You can ask, in plain English, for snow falling on a black background, and it will give you code that creates a virtual snowstorm. If you ask for a blue bouncing ball, it will give you that, too.
“You can tell it to do something, and it will do it,” said Ania Kubow, another programmer who has used the technology.
Codex can generate programs in
