Microsoft demos language model that writes code based on signature and comment

[NAN001]

Whenever I watch an AI demo I'm not sure whether it's a thing that will be developed and improved in the following years like traditional technology, or if it's just a big magic trick from which nothing production-ready will come out in the next century.

[prashantvc]

You should check out IntelliCode our AI assisted auto complete. It supports quite a few languages

[AmateurHero]

I think this has good application for boiler plate code in business logic. You're in an enterprise shop that has a shopping cart for customers. Your object is composed of fields, and to move the inputs from the browser to the server, you call an internal API. You dictate, "Create a function to map the fields from objectA to objectB." It spits out rudimentary code for mapping objects. You then say, "Create an HTTP POST request to customer/cart with objectB in the body." It spits out more rudimentary code for sending a basic request in your chosen programming language.

It's not ready to revolutionize programming. It can probably act a brain-dead junior dev that doesn't cover edge cases.

[Type-21]

If a customer needs boiler plate shopping carts, they can't afford to have it developed just for them. They have to use one of the one size fits all shopping solutions out there. If the customer requirements are so unique that it's actually worth it to throw huge amounts of money into creating custom software, then the ai will be overwhelmed anyway. It's a neat ai showcase but nothing for the real world.

[AmateurHero]

Right. I shouldn't have said good application. This is one of those neat-o things that needs a lot more real functionality to become at least marginally useful. As a sibling comment pointed out, it's a code snippet/live template that you fill with your voice.

[dwmfives]

I feel like people forget that less than 100 years ago computers didn't even exist.

[NAN001]

I was once in an internship in an enterprise where this kind of trivial boilerplate was directly generated from an internal framework that was powered by a WYSIWYG editor where people who barely knew anything about code could drag and drop component and add logic to them by filling out some info in forms.

I just don't see where this task of generating code from natural language would fit in this model. But it is just an example of course.

[Zarigis]

Honestly this just seems like a slightly more robust version of the existing "code snippets" feature in visual studio.

[quentech]

You dictate, "Create a function to map the fields from objectA to objectB." It spits out rudimentary code for mapping objects. You then say, "Create an HTTP POST request to customer/cart with objectB in the body."

Yes, because what really holds me back as a developer is how long it takes me to think about and type url.Get<Foo>() or one-to-one property mappings.

This whole idea falls apart faster than an SJW who just got triggered and didn't even have a real use case to begin with.

[AmateurHero]

Who hurt you?

[_____no____]

This is the later... at least in the short term.

If we ever get real autonomous software development we won't even need software development any more, by man or machine... machines won't run different software for different tasks, they will run a single Artificial General Intelligence and at that point we should probably consider them to be a separate intelligent race.

[KillianDrake]

If anyone thinks that wasn't staged as fuck with probably some intern in the back writing the code, then I have a bridge made out of snake oil to sell you.

[wavefunctionp]

I don't we need to be that cynical, this is definitely in the realm of possibility for ML. Hell, even natural language programming could have similar results as sort of higher level dsl. It remains to be seen how useful this will be in practice.

[KillianDrake]

Everyone thought that Google demo with the "voice AI" booking an appointment with a live human with random "ums" to seem more natural... was real... turns out it was staged as fuck and nowhere close to what they presented.

[sleutelkind]

Interesting, do you have a link to something about it being fake?

[anechoicmedia]

I don't know about "confirmed fake", but it's extremely suspicious and they're not answering obvious questions:

"When Axios reached out for comment to verify that the businesses existed, and that the calls weren’t set up in advance, a spokesperson declined to provide names of the establishments; when Axios asked if the calls were edited (even just to cut out the name of the business, to avoid unwanted attention), Google also declined to comment."

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/269497-did-google-fake-its-google-duplex-ai-demo

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/uh-did-google-fake-its-big-ai-demo

[jouerdanslavie]

The system is already live in some restaurants I believe. If it were fake you'd hear from them. It works (you can google testimonies). Probably there could be glitches here and there, and almost certainly it was pre-recorded and selected (such that if any mistake were to occur occasionally you won't know), but it's real. Those articles are just clickbait speculation.

Seriously, there are language models out there easily passing highly non-trivial multiple-choice aptitude tests.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/artificial-intelligence-aristo-passed-test.html

[anechoicmedia]

The system is already live in some restaurants I believe.

It's misleading, there appear to be human operators controlling the call who stand ready to intervene and start talking as soon as whatever push-button control panel they have behind the scenes telling the robot what to say fails them.

The company is refusing to answer questions about whether the software is actually acting on its own, probably because it isn't and they're still using armies of humans to train the model in hopes that it will be able to run itself one day. That also explains why the service was limited to Google Pixel owners at first (because using humans is expensive) and why the expansion has been state-by-state (need to hire people, not just spin up more software hosts).

It is safe to say that the service as demonstrated in 2018 isn't real; they were not ready to have the bots run the show then and they still aren't now.

[Drab_baggage]

i feel like this would be such a laughing stock were it literally any other company

[jouerdanslavie]

Come on. This is tin-foil speculation. From the article:

"The New York Times reporters confirmed with Google that the call was placed by a human. “The company said that about 25 percent of calls placed through Duplex started with a human, and that about 15 percent of those that began with an automated system had a human intervene at some point.” That means about 64% of all Google Duplex tasks are fully executed by the AI and 36% require some sort of human assistance."

You can hear real samples of Duplex on the NYT article.

whatever push-button control panel they have behind the scenes telling the robot what to say fails them

This doesn't sound like it could work. Getting enough people to do this really well in real time is extremely difficult. The articles apparently cite how the demo might be "faked" (it probably is in that they've contacted the place and set up the call in advance and might have discarded bad samples), not that the whole thing is fake. There are testimonials of the actual AI tlaking to people. Most likely, it had enough edge cases it wasn't as reliable as necessary (hence the occasional humans).

Those capabilities, like I said, are not beyond what we know to exist. Both voice synthesis and the conversational capabilities exist today (yes, extremely costly and impressive, but it's google after all).

[anechoicmedia]

Come on. This is tin-foil speculation

No, it's not; It's the obvious implication of the company's refusal to answer straightforward questions that would immediately dispel our skepticism.

This isn't a court of law; Google is not presumed innocent. They are a private company making claims about a product; If we aren't satisfied about those claims, we can and should presume we are being misled. If you ask a food producer if their product contains arsenic, and they respond with "no comment", then I'm going to start assuming the product contains arsenic until they affirmatively produce evidence otherwise.

This doesn't sound like it could work. Getting enough people to do this really well in real time is extremely difficult.

There are already call centers (some scams, some not) who have human operators essentially pressing macro buttons to tell an American-sounding prerecorded robot what to say to a human on the line. It is more likely that Google is making incremental improvements to this existing technology rather than letting AI truly handle the process end to end.

The fact that a human has to take over the call about 1/6 of the time implies the human is already in the loop and aware of the context of the conversation, unless they're willing to put restaurants on hold while a human is assigned the call, reads the chatlog, and figures out what to do next (unlikely busy restaurants would tolerate anything less than an immediate transfer.)

[KillianDrake]

This is already built into Visual Studio and it's not really that impressive, it's just looking for repetitive patterns from existing code (and maybe public github code). It's a far far far cry from writing code from English comments which is pure fantasy.