Computers are getting better at writing their own code, but software engineers may not need to worry about losing their jobs just yet.
DeepMind, a U.K. artificial intelligence lab acquired by Google in 2014, announced Wednesday that it has created a piece of software called AlphaCode that can code just as well as an average human programmer.
“AlphaCode placed at about the level of the median competitor, marking the first time an AI code generation system has reached a competitive level of performance in programming competitions,” the DeepMind team behind the tool said.
But one computer scientist says human-level coding is “still light-years away.”
“The [AlphaCode] system ranks behind 54.3% participants,” he said, adding that many of the participants are high school or college students who are just honing their problem-solving skills.
Bahdanau said most people reading his tweet could “easily train to outperform AlphaCode.”
Researchers have been trying to teach computers to write code for decades but the concept has yet to go mainstream, partly because the AI tools that are meant to write new code have not been versatile enough.
