The world's first AI software engineer

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Imagine spending years of your life studying computer science, only to find one day that large chunks of your job could be automated by AI. A startup called Cognition AI claims they’ve built the world’s first “AI engineer” — and observers are calling it one of the biggest AI advancements of the year.

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TODAY’S MENU

• Cognition AI claims to create world’s first AI software engineer

• 5 ways to analyze and visualize data with ChatGPT

• How Silicon Valley is wooing top university talent

• Chart: How generative AI impacts the world’s productivity

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• AI Generated Images: Breaking Bad, Ghibli Style

NEWS

Today in AI & Tech

• AI Express: China is using AI to run the world’s largest high-speed rail network. The tech reportedly warns maintenance teams of track abnormalities with 95% accuracy.

• Smart Capital: Abu Dhabi is reportedly creating an AI investment firm that could hold more than $100Bn in assets within a few years.

• Hiring Heist: Meta has accused a former vice president of stealing propriety AI intel, including information about employees who later took jobs at the VP’s new startup.

• Insta-Imitator: Video-sharing platform TikTok is allegedly developing an image-focused Instagram rival.

• App Autonomy: In its latest attempt to appease EU regulators, Apple said it will let app developers distribute products directly from their websites.

NEXT IN AI

Cognition AI claims to create world’s first AI software engineer, leaves many in awe

A small team of award-winning coders has secretly been working on a project that many observers say has the potential to reshape software engineering as we know it. A Peter Thiel-backed startup called Cognition AI has unveiled an AI-powered software engineering platform that can complete entire coding projects from scratch.

What can it do? Cognition’s platform, known as Devin, can: 

• Finish an entire software project on its own (most AI coding assistants only offer coding suggestions)

• Anticipate coding problems before they occur and adjust its decision-making accordingly

• Build new websites and AI apps from scratch

• Create custom Chrome extensions and complete some coding jobs on Upwork

• Fix nearly 14% of GitHub issues found in real-world open-source projects without a helping hand from humans (far exceeding most models’ 2% resolve rate)

Can it live up to the hype?  A Bloomberg reporter tested Devin this week and said he watched it build a custom website in under 10 minutes. The CEO of fintech company Ramp called Devin the “single most impressive demo I’ve seen in the past decade.” The CEO of AI heavyweight Perplexity AI also counts himself as a fan, praising the system’s ability to “look at results, replan, and iterate till success.”

Are software engineering jobs in peril? “If you could fully automate software engineering (my job), I think that would be great, since I could then move on to higher-leverage things,“ says Francois Chollet, one of the world’s leading AI engineers.

But Chollet is skeptical: “Software engineering is not about copy/pasting code. Software engineering is the development and manipulation of mental models of problems and their solutions.“ While talk of AI agents replacing jobs has been ripe for some time now, Devin may prove to be an aid rather than a replacement for software engineers and developers. Time will tell.

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AI AT WORK

5 ways to analyze and visualize data with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is great at generating words and images, but it’s also pretty darn good at crunching numbers and turning them into charts and visualizations.

Here are 5 quick ways you can start analyzing data with ChatGPT today:

1. Clean, organize, and format your data

It can sometimes take hours to format data in a spreadsheet before you can get to the real work of analyzing and manipulating the data. Luckily, you can upload your spreadsheet to ChatGPT and let it do the data formatting for you.

Sample Prompt: Remove duplicates and missing values from this spreadsheet

You can also ask ChatGPT to: convert data types and formats, rename columns, find and replace values.

2. Identify patterns and extract insights

ChatGPT is pretty handy when it comes to running an analysis on your dataset to find insights, anomalies, and trends.

Sample Prompt: Analyze this data and generate a summary of key trends, patterns, and anomalies.

3. Manipulate the data

Sample Prompt: Filter the data to include only rows where the age is greater than 25, then sort by salary.

4. Conduct advanced analyses such as location analysis, time series analysis, and more

Sample Prompt: Analyze the time series data for store visits in every city and identify seasonal trends in visitor traffic.

5. Visualize the data

Sample Prompt: Create a bar chart from the data in this spreadsheet [upload spreadsheet]

You can also generate: Box plots, area charts, heat maps, pie charts, correlation charts, radar charts, and more.

Note: The data analysis feature is only available to paid ChatGPT subscribers. Also take care not to upload any sensitive or confidential information. We recommend anonymizing your data before uploading it by taking measures such as removing email addresses and other personal information.

AI & EMPLOYMENT

The tug-of-war over Silicon Valley’s top AI talent

You’ve got to spend money to make money if you want to stay relevant in AI, it seems. And unfortunately for academic institutions — who often have very little funding — Silicon Valley is ready to shell out the big bucks. 

Private companies are luring in top scholars with exorbitant salaries: Netflix, for instance, posted a machine-learning-oriented position last year for a mind-boggling $900,000 annually. Some activists worry that university brain drain might further concentrate top AI talent into the hands of a few giant corporations.

But money isn’t the only thing driving academics away. They also know that new advancements are no longer taking place inside university labs. One Stanford study found that academic institutions had created just three major machine learning algorithms in 2022 compared with 32 from private entities, according to the Washington Post.

The battle over top talent in AI goes far beyond academia though. Startups are running into the same problem as they try to find their footing in the industry: Perplexity AI's CEO recently told Business Insider he’d failed to win over a top researcher from Meta because the candidate knew Perplexity was working with far less computing power. ”Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,” the researcher reportedly quipped.

CHART

How generative AI has impacted productivity around the world

Workers in India, Indonesia, and the UAE are far more likely to embrace generative AI in their work compared with Western nations, according to a recent YouGov survey.

Two-thirds of employees in India said generative AI has improved their productivity at work. Meanwhile, just 17% of Americans said the same. Americans were also the most likely nationality to report that AI had hindered their productivity, with 12% reporting that AI had played a negative role.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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Beautiful.ai: An AI-fueled deck designer that helps employees build meaningful pitches, slideshows, and reports.

Picurious: An app that allows you to upload a photo, then receive insights and answers about the subject of the image.

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AI GENERATED IMAGES

Breaking Bad, Ghibli style

Prompt: breaking bad in the style of studio ghibli directed by Hayao Miyazaki

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Until next time!

Zain

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