AI News. Meet Devin, SIMA and Moxie

It’s been another big couple of weeks in AI with innovation flying in left, right, and centre. Here are three new innovations you might not have seen yet but we think are interesting and perhaps a little scary.

Meet Devin

Cognition Labs have announced (but not released yet) Devin, the first AI software engineer. Watch the video, it looks both interesting and promising. It does overlap with some other technologies (we’ve been playing with GPT Engineer for a while now). Does this mean the end of the software engineer? Time will tell. However, there is no doubt that their role is changing, and if they don’t change, then their days could be numbered. We like to see software engineers as more of a ‘Master’ working with an ‘Apprentice’. The AI tool is the apprentice. You need to brief it, check it, improve it and give it good feedback to get the best out of it.

Google has announced SIMA

This one is a bit more for the nerds, yet it is an important part of the progress we see being made in AI. Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent (SIMA) is described as a generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments. It plays games. And it plays games like a human does. There are multiple benefits to this. This means that AI systems can be developed to behave more human-like in many different environments. It also means that software can be tested in the way that a real human might. Read more in Google Blog post

Would you leave your child alone with Moxie?

We’re seeing AI pop up in all kinds of places, and robots are an obvious choice. But does your child need a ‘companion’ robot? We get the feeling that these people didn’t watch the movie AI before creating this robot. Perhaps they should have. If you’d like your very own Moxie, head over to moxierobot.com.