AI research company OpenAI is releasing a new machine learning tool that translates the English language into code. The software is called Codex and is designed to speed up the work of professional programmers, as well as help amateurs get started coding.
In demos of Codex, OpenAI shows how the software can be used to build simple websites and rudimentary games using natural language, as well as translate between different programming languages and tackle data science queries. Users type English commands into the software, like “create a webpage with a menu on the side and title at the top,” and Codex translates this into code. The software is far from infallible and takes some patience to operate, but could prove invaluable in making coding faster and more accessible.
“We see this as a tool to multiply programmers,” OpenAI’s CTO and co-founder Greg Brockman told The Verge. “Programming has two parts to it: you have ‘think hard about a problem and try to understand it,’ and ‘map those small pieces to existing code, whether it’s a library, a function, or an API.’” The second part is tedious, he says, but it’s what Codex is best at. “It takes people who are already programmers and removes the drudge work.”
OpenAI used an earlier version of Codex to build a tool called Copilot for GitHub, a code repository owned by Microsoft, which is itself a close partner of OpenAI. Copilot is similar to the autocomplete tools found in Gmail, offering suggestions on how to finish lines of code as users type them out. OpenAI’s new version of Codex, though, is much more advanced and flexible, not just completing code, but creating it.
Codex is built on the top of GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generation model, which was trained on a sizable chunk of the internet, and as a result can generate and parse the written word in impressive ways. One application users found for GPT-3 was generating code, but Codex improves upon its predecessors’ abilities and is trained specifically on open-source code repositories scraped from the web.
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