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Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

deepmind.com

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Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#41

Post by jxcole »

msoad wrote: post #19

This seems to have a narrower scope than GitHub Copilot. It generates more lines of code to a more holistic problem vs. GitHub Copilot that works as a "more advanced autocomplete" in code editors. Sure Copilot can synthesize full functions and classes but for me, it's the most useful when it suggests another test case's title or writes repetitive code like this.foo = foo; this.bar = bar etc... Having used Copilot I c…

I feel like you are very defensive here and I want to be sure we take time to recognize this as a real accomplishment.

Seriously though, I do doubt I can be fully replaced by a robot any time soon, it may be the case that soon enough I can make high-level written descriptions of programs and hand them off to an AI to do most of the work. This wouldn't completely replace me, but it could make developers 50x productive. The question is how elastic is the market...can the market grow in step with our increase in productivitiy?

Also, please remember that as with anything, within 5 years we should see vast improvements to this AI. I think it will be an important thing to watch.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#43

Post by chroem- »

streetcat1 wrote: post #30
hmate9 wrote: post #2

Between this and OpenAI's Github Copilot "programming" will slowly start dying probably. What I mean by that is that sure, you have to learn how to program, but our time will be spent much more on just the design part and writing detailed documentation/specs and then we just have one of these AIs generate the code. It's the next step. Binary code Historically its always been about abstracting and writing less code to…

First, If this is correct, if alpha code succeeded, this will bring to its own demise. I.e. as soon as it starts replacing humans, it will not have enough human generated training data, since all of programming will be done by models like himself. Second, alphacode was specifically trained for competitive programming : 1. short programs. 2. Each program has 100's of human generated solutions. However, commercial prog…

Reinforcement learning and adversarial training can render both of those concerns as non-issues in practice.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#44

Post by visarga »

pretendscholar wrote: post #42

I am a little bitter that it is trained on stuff that I gave away for free and will be used by a billion dollar company to make more money. I contributed the majority of that code before it was even owned by Microsoft.

Paying it forward, it will help others in turn.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#45

Post by visarga »

jxcole wrote: post #41
msoad wrote: post #19

This seems to have a narrower scope than GitHub Copilot. It generates more lines of code to a more holistic problem vs. GitHub Copilot that works as a "more advanced autocomplete" in code editors. Sure Copilot can synthesize full functions and classes but for me, it's the most useful when it suggests another test case's title or writes repetitive code like this.foo = foo; this.bar = bar etc... Having used Copilot I c…

I feel like you are very defensive here and I want to be sure we take time to recognize this as a real accomplishment. Seriously though, I do doubt I can be fully replaced by a robot any time soon, it may be the case that soon enough I can make high-level written descriptions of programs and hand them off to an AI to do most of the work. This wouldn't completely replace me, but it could make developers 50x productive…

The GPT family has already shown more than 50x productivity increase by being able to solve not one, but hundreds and perhaps thousands of tasks on the same model. We used to need much more data, and the model would be more fragile, and finding the right architecture would be a problem. Now we plug a transformer with a handful of samples and it works.

I just hope LMs will prove to be just as useful in software development as they are in their own field.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#46

Post by prideout »

It is obvious to me that computer programming is an interesting AI goal, but at the same time I wonder if I'm biased, because I'm a programmer. The authors of AlphaCode might be biased in this same way.

I guess this makes sense though, from a practical point of view. Verifying correctness would be difficult in other intellectual disciplines like physics and higher mathematics.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#47

Post by pjmorris »

hmate9 wrote: post #2

Between this and OpenAI's Github Copilot "programming" will slowly start dying probably. What I mean by that is that sure, you have to learn how to program, but our time will be spent much more on just the design part and writing detailed documentation/specs and then we just have one of these AIs generate the code. It's the next step. Binary code Historically its always been about abstracting and writing less code to…

I'd note that assembly, C, and Python didn't replace 'programming' but were expected to do so. I'd wager that what you now call 'detailed documentation/specs' will still be called programming in 10 or even 20 years.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#48

Post by skulk »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #14
c4wrd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask and you shall receive, here is the output it gave me: // Write a Go function to swap the sixth bit and seventeenth bit of a 32-bit signed integer. package main import ( "fmt" "math" ) func main() { var a int32 = 0b1010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010 fmt.Printf("%b\n", a) fmt.Printf("%b\n", swapBits(a, 6, 17)) } func swapBits(a int32, i int, j int) int32 { // convert to binary bin := f…

Ridiculous. It's a joke, right? Perhaps the most inefficient and naive solution ever? CoPilot is regurgitating some solution from its training set, the solution of an inept programmer who would manipulate bits via conversion to string... yikes.

The next iteration of code assistant needs to be able to parse responses like your comment and update the code accordingly. Once a human+computer pair can converge on a correct and admissible solution to _any_ tractable programming task through natural language dialogue, we should start worrying about our jobs going away. Until then, for each line of code generated by AI, there will be two jobs created to maintain that code.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#49

Post by FartyMcFarter »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #28

I would stop programming if all we needed to write was unit tests :p

To compensate, lots of people would start programming if that happened though. Many scientists would be interested in solving their field's problems so easily - certainly maths would benefit from it.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#50

Post by pretendscholar »

visarga wrote: post #44
pretendscholar wrote: post #42

I am a little bitter that it is trained on stuff that I gave away for free and will be used by a billion dollar company to make more money. I contributed the majority of that code before it was even owned by Microsoft.

Paying it forward, it will help others in turn.

Yes it will help the already powerful players disproportionately.
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