Gold-Medalist Coders Build an AI That Can Do Their Job for Them (bloomberg.com) 27
A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc.
You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin.
Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written. The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.
You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin.
Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written. The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.
I'm building an AI (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Yo Dawg, I built and AI that does job interviews and gets jobs my AI can do.
Re: (Score:2)
I have an AI that interviews candidates for me. I can't wait until this AI interviews other AIs.
Mostly it asks random questions from the internet, then says "thank you for your time", and never calls back or follows up. This is a major time saver!
Re: I'm building an AI (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
"First"? (Score:2)
Well, they brag a lot. But can't ALL these LLM things write code? I've had Microsoft Copilot knock out a few shell scripts cuz I was too lazy to look stuff up.
Re: (Score:2)
This lot have some bold claims - namely that it can produce entire programs, rather than just a few functions (their example is that it can write simple games). Also, they claim that it's done some of the jobs on Upwork.
Personally, this one needs a good deal of salt. The claim about Upwork is likely only true after you've spent some time talking to the client to work out what they meant in the job spec and then maybe iterated a handful of solutions until you got something that looks about right. The thing t
Re: (Score:2)
From what I have seen, and I haven't looked into it that much, is that it can follow the instructions on a github page to clone the repository, and build the app based on the instructions on the page, like downloading and installing things. This was all in Python. The game presented was the game of life. There seemed to be a lot of telling the system what to do also in natural language and it would follow up with doing that task.
But nothing super complex and did not see any oops it couldn't do that cases as
How I do not get the job I was told to apply for? (Score:1)
It replied: "Ask them, When do I start handling cash?"
Worked like a charm, AI bro.
So much for the ambiguous school status (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
His name is Ashlee Vance, and based on this article, he burns his sources. Not to be trusted in the future.
Think of all the things we'll be able to accomplis (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
The can't wait to see all of the amazing things this AI will be able to accomplish. I plan on asking it to write a program to solve the halting problem. After that I'll have it tackle world hunger and after it knocks that one out, maybe an app to tell me whether or not a tie goes good with my outfit.
I don't know if the AI solutions will be good, but I bet it will be very confident about whatever solution it comes up with.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Boss: Fix bug 879136 please.
Me: There should be a website for that!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm hoping that when I ask it to provide a proof that P != NP that it never halts, eventually consuming the entire universe as its polynomial logic tries to keep up with a solution space that grows exponentially. If the universe does not end, then this proves that P == NP.
Hello World? (Score:2)
Pong huh? (Score:2)
It says this thing can create games but the only game example they have is Pong which I'm pretty sure chatgpt could easily create in a short time. I've seen other attempts at AI creating games and they aren't good.
I'm not sure you're going to get rich from building an ai that can create games is anyway, 95% of games that humans create make almost no revenue. Look at all the games that came out today on steam with 0 reviews.
They have some nice photos of their fancy new york office but where are the photos of
ahm.. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
So.. they developed a search engine with extra steps?
You don't understand. This a search engine with extra steps using AI. It's all the rage right now.
Re: (Score:1)
Silicon Valley much ? (Score:2)
And I mean the Mike Judge version. This line
"...whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York"
which I know is meant to sound all cool and stuff. But to me this sounds like a bunch of dudez who want to 'play' start-up, clikety claking bogus code in biz class over flyover country while luring investors farther down the pyramid scheme.
Re: (Score:2)
And I mean the Mike Judge version. This line
"...whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York"
which I know is meant to sound all cool and stuff. But to me this sounds like a bunch of dudez who want to 'play' start-up, clikety claking bogus code in biz class over flyover country while luring investors farther down the pyramid scheme.
The real question is, how many guys could each of them jerk off with the assistance of the AI they're building?
Read only project (Score:2)
Well, if your job is to spit out business-card-like read-only websites that scrape and display information like Italian restauranta, then yes - AI can do your job because the job itself is a tedious, repeatable, unnecessary chore. Now, try writing "AI" that speaks to stakeholders and turns their vague requirements into working, business-logic-heavy code. Good luck with that.
Re: (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/m4OvQIGDg4I?s... [youtu.be]