If this is the way to superintelligence, it remains a bizarre one. “This is back to a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare,” Emily Bender told me. But OpenAI’s technology effectively crunches those years down to seconds. A company blog boasts that an o1 model scored better than most humans on a recent coding test that allowed participants to submit 50 possible solutions to each problem—but only when o1 was allowed 10,000 submissions instead. No human could come up with that many possibilities in a reasonable length of time, which is exactly the point. To OpenAI, unlimited time and resources are an advantage that its hardware-grounded models have over biology. Not even two weeks after the launch of the o1 preview, the start-up presented plans to build data centers that would each require the power generated by approximately five large nuclear reactors, enough for almost 3 million homes.
I think you (or I) misunderstand something. You have a test for a small well defined unit like a C function. und let the AI generate code until the test passes. The unit test is binary, either it passes or not. The unit test only looks at the result after running the unit with different inputs, it does not “go through millions of lines of code”.
And you keep doing that for every unit.
The writing of the code is a fairly mechanical thing at this point because the design has been done in detail before by the human.
For that use case yes, but when you have unpredictable code, you would need to write way more just to do sanity checks for behaviour you haven’t even thought of.
As in, using AI might introduce waaay more edge cases.
How often have you ever written a piece of code that is super well defined? I have very little guidance on what code look like and so when I start working on a project. This is the equivalent of the spherical chicken in a vacuum problem in physics classes. It’s not a real case you’ll ever see.
And in cases where it is a short well defined function, just write the function. You’ll be done before the AI finishes.
This sounds pretty typical for a hobbyist project but is not the case in many industries, especially regulated ones. It is not uncommon to have engineers whose entire job is reading specifications and implementing them. In those cases, it’s often the case that you already have compliance tests that can be used as a starting point for your public interfaces. You’ll need to supplement those compliance tests with lower level tests specific to your implementation.
Ironic, because I am an engineer. I’ve been coding for almost 15 years now.
Many people write tests before writing code. This is common and called Test Driven Development. Having an AI bruteforce your unit tests is actually already the basis for a “programming language” that I saw on hackernews a week or so ago.
I despise most AI applications, and this is definitely one. However it’s not some foreign concept impossible in reality:
https://wonderwhy-er.medium.com/ai-tdd-you-write-tests-ai-generates-code-c8ad41813c0a