Stealing the spotlight in the AI world, a US-based AI lab, Cognition, has announced the launch of what it calls the world’s ‘first fully autonomous’ AI software engineer, named Devin.
“Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review. With Devin, engineers can focus on more interesting problems, and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals,” read the company’s official blog post on Devin.
Today we’re excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
Devin is… pic.twitter.com/ladBicxEat
— Cognition (@cognition_labs) March 12, 2024
Cognition has also released a captivating video on the same:
What can Devin do?
According to the developers, Devin has been equipped with common developer tools including the shell, code editor, and browser within a sandboxed compute environment. It can:
- Learn how to use unfamiliar technologies.
- Build and deploy apps end-to-end
- Autonomously find and fix bugs in codebases
- Train and fine-tune its own AI models
- Address bugs and feature requests in open-source repositories
- Contribute to mature production repositories.
- Complete real jobs on Upwork.
How is its performance?
Devin correctly resolves 13.86 percent of the issues end-to-end, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art of 1.96 percent. Even when given the exact files to edit, the best previous models can only resolve 4.80% of issues,” Cognition clarified in their blog post.
They also plan to publish a more detailed technical report soon.
Controversy:
While news of Devin’s development has spread through the internet, it has left social media users with mixed reactions.
“RIP me, replaced by a machine before even getting the skills and degree,” one user on X (formerly Twitter) joked.
“We had a good run, bro; now it is going to be an AI world,” another added.
A third user questioned: “I don’t understand why developers willingly code the entire industry out of jobs. I understand why companies would want this, but I don’t understand why developers are willingly doing this and coding themselves and everyone else out of getting good paying jobs.”
Several articles and videos have also questioned if Devin. Thus, while the launch of the new AI software engineer has been met with considerable excitement across various quarters, it has added fuel to the fire in the great AI debate and has made users question the ethnical purpose of artificial intelligence and its threat to jobs and livelihood.
Devin is currently in early access as Cognition ramps up its capacity.
Leave feedback about this