The Download: AI’s coding promises, and OpenAI’s longevity push

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding.

Everyone from established AI giants to buzzy startups is promising to take coding assistants to the next level. Instead of providing developers with a kind of supercharged autocomplete, this next generation can prototype, test, and debug code for you. The upshot is that developers could essentially turn into managers, who may spend more time reviewing and correcting code written by a model than writing it from scratch themselves.

But there’s more. Many of the people building generative coding assistants think that they could be a fast track to artificial general intelligence, the hypothetical superhuman technology that a number of top firms claim to have in their sights.Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

OpenAI has created an AI model for longevity science

When you think of AI’s contributions to science, you probably think of AlphaFold, the Google DeepMind protein-folding program that earned its creator a Nobel Prize last year. Now OpenAI says it’s getting into the science game too—with a model for engineering proteins.

The company says it has developed a language model that dreams up proteins capable of turning regular cells into stem cells—and that it has handily beat humans at the task.

The work represents OpenAI’s first model focused on biological data and its first public claim that its models can deliver unexpected scientific results. But until outside scientists get their hands on it, we can’t say just how impressive it really is. Read the full story.

—Antonio Regalado