MIT Technology Review’s Will Douglas Heaven provides a comprehensive overview of the AI revolution in software development, showcasing the innovative startups driving this change.
They are monetizing a real need for programmers and businesses, who are already using these tools massively. A quarter of the code produced by Google today is generated by AI, according to Google CEO Sunday Pichai.
The key takeaway is that these programs are so good that the job of engineers is now to write prompts and review code written by machines.
The first step has been to train the models from billions of lines of code found online, offering a super-powerful autocorrect.
They are now using machine learning techniques to allow the model to “play” in a simulated environment iteratively, much like Google’s DeepMind did with AlphaGo, when it won against the world champion in 2017.
The goal of the game is to arrive at a model that understands the logic underlying any programming language.
Achieving that logical understanding would be to software development what the introduction of ATMs has been to banking.
The speed of development once this logical understanding is achieved will allow the machines to solve problems by programming on the fly, and this they say will be the true AGI.