Salesforce has unveiled CodeGen, a large scale language model which turns simple English prompts into executable code. You just have to describe what the code should do in natural language, and the machine writes it for you.
CodeGen combines conversational AI (interactive human-to-machine dialogue) and automatic programming (the system automatically creates the program based on a higher-level language).
Salesforce’s implementation of conversational AI programming provides a glimpse into the future of democratising software engineering for the masses. An “AI assistant” translates English descriptions into functional and executable Python code – allowing anyone to write code, even if one knows nothing about programming. The underlying language model, CodeGen, enables this conversational paradigm and will be made available as open source to accelerate research.
Salesforce AI Research trained CodeGen, a 16-billion parameter auto-regressive language model, on a large corpus of natural and programming languages. CodeGen can be applied to both simple and complex problems, using natural language. With CodeGen, most users can solve relatively simple coding problems with little or no prior programming knowledge. More complex cases may require some knowledge of programming or basic computer science concepts, in order to help guide the system as it searches for a solution). Still, even for experienced coders, CodeGen makes getting to a functioning solution faster and easier, and allows rapid exploration of alternate methods.
