👩🏻✈️The GitHub CoPilot Milestone
📝 Editorial
Using AI to automate programming has been one of the aspirational goals of machine learning since its early days. There is something incredibly seductive about the idea of using machine intelligence to generate code, but the specifics of the problem have made it really impractical for machine learning techniques. From the lack of high-quality code datasets to train supervised learning models, the diversity of different programming languages, to the contextual nuances of each software application, there are numerous challenges that make the intelligent code generation problem more difficult than it seems at first glance. Recent breakthroughs in NLP, with architectures such as transformers, seem to finally bring us closer to a potential solution to this difficult problem.
GitHub CoPilot is a new ML system created as part of a collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI to streamline the generation of code snippets across different programming languages. You can think of CoPilot as AI-powered pair programming which, if nothing else, sounds kind of cool 😊. The new technology is powered by OpenAI Codex, which is a variation of GPT-3 but specialized in code generation. Just like GPT-3 is able to understand English, Spanish or French, Codex can analyze contextual information in programming languages like Python, TypeScript, Java, and many others. Codex was trained in large amounts of source code repositories including those in GitHub. With Microsoft and GitHub developer reach, CoPilot has the opportunity to achieve mainstream adoption by the developer community and, for the first time, it feels that we might be getting closer to a real solution to the intelligent code generation problem in machine learning.
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Edge#103: Recap of Reinforcement Learning series
Edge#104 is about AllenNLP which makes cutting-edge NLP models look easy
Now, let’s review the most important developments in the AI industry this week
🔎 ML Research
New NLP Research and Datasets
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) published new research and datasets that can help advance conversational systems on a large scale ->read more on FAIR blog
Continuous ML at Uber
The Uber engineering team published an insightful blog post about the best practices to enable continuous integration in its ML infrastructure ->read more on Uber blog
Causal Reasoning
Microsoft Research published a paper detailing CausalCity, an open-source, high fidelity environment to improve causal reasoning in ML systems ->read more on Microsoft Research blog
Game Testing
Google Research published a detailed blog post unveiling a new ML system that can improve game testing at scale->read more on Google Research blog
🤖 Cool AI Tech Releases
GitHub Copilot
Microsoft and OpenAI collaborated in the release of CoPilot, an AI agent that can automate code recommendations ->read more on GitHub blog
Habitat 2.0
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open-sourced Habitat 2.0, a new version of its environment to advance embodied AI research ->read more on FAIR blog
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Conversational AI platform for employees support Moveworks raised $200 million in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global and Alkeon Capital. Many interesting job offerings.
Enterprise API security company Noname Security raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners. Hiring.
AI-powered data infrastructure platform for IoT Mapped raised $6.5 million in seed II funding led by MetaProp and Allegion Ventures. Hiring.
ML-backed platform for frictionless money movement between banks Orum raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding led by Accel and Canapi Ventures. Hiring.
AI-augmented networking analytics platform Augtera Networks raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Intel Capital. They are hiring broadly (no detailed job descriptions).
Cloud-based HR analytics platform Visier raised $125 million in a Series E round led by Goldman Sachs at a valuation exceeding $1B USD. Hiring in Canada, the US, Europe, and remote.
Voice of Customer (VoC) analytics platform Wonderflow raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Klass Capital.