Microsoft has recently demonstrated how artificial intelligence can be integrated into a variety of software applications by writing code on the fly.
At the Microsoft Build developer conference today, the company's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, demonstrated an AI helper for the game Minecraft. The game's non-player character is powered by the same machine-learning technology Microsoft has been testing to create software code. This feat suggests the way that recent advancements in AI could transform personal computing in the years to come by replacing interfaces that you type, tap, and click to navigate into interfaces that you simply have a conversation with.
The Minecraft agent responds to commands typed by turning them into code that runs behind the scenes by using the software API for the game. The AI model that runs the bot was developed using huge amounts of code and natural language text and then presented with the API specifications for Minecraft and a few usage examples. The AI model that runs the base will automatically generate the code required to move the agent toward the player whenever a player says "come here." The bot was able to complete more complex tasks in the Build demo, like retrieving items and combining them into new items. And because the model was trained on natural language and code, it can even answer simple questions about how to build things.
Although it's not certain how reliable the system will work beyond the demo, similar techniques could still be employed to make different applications respond when spoken or written commands are made available.
Microsoft has created an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot on top of the same technology. It automatically suggests code when a developer starts writing or responds to comments to an article. MINECRAFT says Copilot is the first instance of what is likely to be a slew of "AI-first" products in the next few years, from Microsoft and other companies. Coding AI "lets you think about doing software development in a different way, so you can express an intention for something that you want to achieve," he says.
Scott doesn't give specific examples, but it could be a variant of Windows that locates a document and emails it to a colleague upon request. Or an AI-imbued Excel version that turns a dataset into charts when you ask. "We're going to see lots and many big productivity wins for all sorts of cognitive tasks that no one particularly enjoys," Scott says.
In recent years, AI has proven adept at tasks such as classifying images, transcribing music and even translating text. The latest AI programs are capable of producing coherent text, similar to computer code thanks to the latest algorithmic advances and massive amounts of computer power.
The Minecraft bot was created using an AI model called Codex which was created by OpenAI which is an AI company which received funding from Microsoft in the year 2019. Codex was trained using natural language text from the internet and billions of lines of code from GitHub, a popular software repository owned by Microsoft.
Microsoft's Copilot was initially made available to a small number of testers in June 2021. Copilot is currently utilized daily by more than 10,000 developers, who create at least 35 percent, their code in popular languages like Python and Java using Copilot. The company plans to make Copilot available for anyone to download in the summer of 2021. To build something like the Minecraft bot, developers will need to work with the underlying AI model, Codex.
Both Codex and Copilot have sparked anxieties among developers who worry that they will be eliminated from a job. The Minecraft demo has sparked similar concerns. Scott says that feedback from Copilot has been mostly positive. This suggests that Copilot is merely a tool to automate more difficult programming tasks. He says that if talk to someone who is a Copilot user, they will tell you, "This is such a great tool."