The startup behind the Internet’s favourite chatbot is trying to teach its AI how to code.
Driving the news: OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has hired coders to complete software engineering tasks— and, more importantly, to explain in English how they coded their solutions.
- The aim is to teach an AI system to produce code from simple language prompts.
- OpenAI has hired about a thousand contractors over the past six months, with 40% of them assigned to helping its AI models learn about software engineering.
Why it matters: An AI tool that lets people write basic programs just by describing what they want in plain English could revolutionize software development and allow people without technical skills to create their own software.
- Less optimistically, it could also wipe out a whole bunch of jobs in tech: OpenAI’s coder contractors are training an AI tool that could ultimately replace them in the workplace.
Yes, but: Some tech engineers are already fighting back against this kind of thing. Developers are suing Microsoft over an autocomplete tool for coding called CoPilot–powered by OpenAI technology–which they say was trained on their open-source work without their permission.
- It’s common for AI to be trained on data scraped from the internet—and problematic. Stability AI, the company behind the Stability Diffusion image generator, is facing lawsuits from graphic artists and Getty Images for using their content to train its AI model.
Bottom line: Next time you have one of those great app ideas, you might not have to pester your programmer friends to build it. As one AI expert tweeted, “The hottest new programming language is English.”