Devin can write code, collaborate with co-workers, accept their feedback, and moonlight on Upwork—just don't mistake Devin for a human. This advancement in generative AI software development comes from 2-month-old startup Cognition AI, which is backed by Peter Thiel's venture capital fund, Business Insider reports. BI writes that Devin's capabilities seem to be "a notch above" past offerings (which acted more as a co-pilot or assistant to developers, performing prompts like writing simple code, VentureBeat notes). In contrast, Devin doesn't function through probability like most AI, scanning through data to surmise the best answer—instead, it dips into machine learning that can reason, prompting Cognition AI to deem it "the first AI software engineer."
Company CEO Scott Wu wrote on its blog that Devin's technology should free up developer time for "more interesting" problems and allow them to work toward "more ambitious goals," but others see the writing on the wall. "We could be trying to cure cancers or make tax prep 100% free, but instead we're trying to aggressively replace one of the few remaining jobs that provides a legit middle-class income," Kyle Shevlin, founder of software development agency Athagist, tweeted in response to Cognition AI's announcement. InfoWorld writes that generative AI that can achieve what Devin claims it can do could easily replace entry-level software engineering jobs.
Freelancers should also be wary—in a test, Devin successfully completed a paid task on Upwork (which you can see in action on YouTube). The assignment was to assess damages on a road via a computer vision model, which it wrote and debugged code for. While Cognition AI is diving first into software development, this new use of AI could be far-reaching. "By solving reasoning, we can unlock new possibilities in a wide range of disciplines—code is just the beginning," Wu wrote. (More stories on artificial intelligence.)
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