AI Could Soon Write Code Based On Ordinary Language

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI shared plans to bring GPT-3, one of the world's most advanced models for generating text, to programming based on natural language descriptions. This is the first commercial application of GPT-3 undertaken since Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI last year and gained exclusive licensing rights to GPT-3. "If you can describe what you want to do in natural language, GPT-3 will generate a list of the most relevant formulas for you to choose from," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a keynote address at the company's Build developer conference. "The code writes itself." Microsoft VP Charles Lamanna told WIRED the sophistication offered by GPT-3 can help people tackle complex challenges and empower people with little coding experience. GPT-3 will translate natural language into PowerFx, a fairly simple programming language similar to Excel commands that Microsoft introduced in March. Microsoft's new feature is based on a neural network architecture known as Transformer, used by big tech companies including Baidu, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Salesforce to create large language models using text training data scraped from the web. These language models continually grow larger. The largest version of Google's BERT, a language model released in 2018, had 340 million parameters, a building block of neural networks. GPT-3, which was released one year ago, has 175 billion parameters. Such efforts have a long way to go, however. In one recent test, the best model succeeded only 14 percent of the time on introductory programming challenges compiled by a group of AI researchers. Still, researchers who conducted that study conclude that tests prove that "machine learning models are beginning to learn how to code."

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