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Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

deepmind.com

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Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#71

Post by bmh100 »

thomasahle wrote: post #56
jxcole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

Not necessarily. Demand may be much higher than available supply right now. Tech companies will continue to compete, requiring spending on developers to remain competitive. Software is unlike manufacturing, in that the output is a service, not a widget. Worker productivity in general has not decreased the demand for full work weeks, despite projections in the early 20th century to the contrary. Of course, it is possible that fewer developers would be needed, but I don't think it's likely, yet.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#72

Post by kevlened »

thomasahle wrote: post #56
jxcole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

Greater efficiency leads to greater consumption unless demand is saturated. Given software’s ability to uncover more problems that are solvable by software, we’re more likely to build 50x more software.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#73

Post by Permit »

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.

Can you elaborate and give some history? What code did you contribute, and how did it end up being used by Microsoft and then DeepMind?

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#74

Post by nsxwolf »

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…

Yesterday, I spent several hours figuring out if the business requirement for "within the next 3 days" meant 3 calendar days or 72 hours from now. Then about 10 minutes actually writing the code. Everyone thought my efforts were very valuable.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#76

Post by baobabKoodaa »

gfd wrote: post #13

Relevant blogpost on codeforces.com (the competitive programming site used): https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/99566 Apparently the bot would have a rating of 1300. Although the elo rating between sites is not comparable, for some perspective, mark zuckerberg had a rating of ~1k when he was in college on topcoder: https://www.topcoder.com/members/mzuckerberg

The median rating is not descriptive of median ability, because a large number of Codeforces competitors only do one or a few competitions. A very small number of competitors hone their skills over multiple competitions. If we were to restrict our sample to competitors with more than 20 competitions, the median rating would be much higher than 1300. It's amazing that Alphacode achieved a 1300 rating, but compared to humans who actually practice competitive coding, this is a low rating.

To clarify, this is a HUGE leap in AI and computing in general. I don't mean to play it down.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#78

Post by londons_explore »

> AlphaCode placed at about the level of the median competitor,

In many programming contests, a large number of people can't solve the problem at all, and drop out without submitting anything. Frequently that means the median scoring solution is a blank file.

Therefore, without further information, this statement shouldn't be taken to be as impressive as it sounds.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#79

Post by stupidcar »

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…

Having used Copilot for a while, I am quite certain it will replace me as a programmer.

It appears to me that when it comes to language models, intelligence = experience * context. Where experience is the amount what's encoded in the model, and context is the prompt. And the biggest limitation on Copilot currently is context. It behaves as an "advanced autocomplete" because it all is has to go on is what regular autocomplete sees, e.g. the last few characters and lines of code.

So, you can write a function name called createUserInDB() and it will attempt to complete it for you. But how does it know what DB technology you're using? Or what your user record looks like? It doesn't, and so you typically end up with a "generic" looking function using the most common DB tech and naming conventions for your language of choice.

But now imagine a future version of Copilot that is automatically provided with a lot more context. It also gets fed a list of your dependencies, from which it can derive which DB library you're using. It gets any locatable SQL schema file, so it can determine the columns in the user table. It gets the text of the Jira ticket, so it can determine the requirements.

As a programmer a great deal of time is spent checking these different sources and synthesising them in your head into an approach, which you then code. But they are all just text, of one form or another, and language models can work with them just as easily, and much faster, than you can.

And one the ML train coding gets running, it'll only get faster. Sooner or later Github will have a "Copilot bot" that can automatically make a stab at fixing issues, which you then approve, reject, or fix. And as thousands of these issues pile up, the training set will get bigger, and the model will get better. Sooner or later it'll be possible to create a repo, start filing issues, and rely on the bot to implement everything.

Re: Competitive Programming with AlphaCode

#80

Post by alasdair_ »

thomasahle wrote: post #56
jxcole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

>If you make developers 50x more efficient, won't you need 50x fewer developers?

Developers today are 50X more efficient than when they had to input machine code on punched tape, yet the number of developers needed today is far larger than it was in those times.

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