😺 Devin

PLUS: AI that fills out BORING forms for you!

Welcome, humans.

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Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

A new coding tool automates 14% of real-world software eng. tasks.
Meta is investing billions of $$$ in Nvidia GPUs.
More junior-level developer work is being automated.
5 of this year’s Pulitzer Prize finalists for journalism used AI in some way.

Meet the ‘first-ever AI software engineer'.

Devin is a groundbreaking AI agent that goes beyond suggesting and autocompleting code—it can do entire engineering projects solo.

hey coders: take a seat, remove your hoodie, and pop an addy.

Devin is the best coding AI yet. On a popular SWE benchmark, it independently solved 13.9% of real-world software tasks—outperforming Claude 2 and GPT-4, which managed just 4.8% and 1.7%, respectively.

Here’s Devin building an interactive website end-to-end and adding features all in one go (link).
Finding and fixing bugs in codebases that slipped past humans (link).
Building an entire custom Chrome extension (link).
Scraping data, running code, and returning a labeled CSV file (link).
Even training and fine-tuning its own AI models (yes, really, link).

So are SWE’s screwed? Are CS degrees worthless? Is “learn to code” dead?

Devin won’t replace software engineers anytime soon—most production-grade software is too complex, unique, or domain-specific to be fully automated at the moment.

But it is becoming very clear that AI could take over more tasks typically assigned to junior developers. In the short term, Devin can aid developers in rapidly prototyping, bootstrapping, and launching MVPs for smaller apps and websites, all on its own.

Here’s our take: GPT-4 and the like have thus far made software engineers moderately more efficient (but not 10x). Tools like Devin that can automate more common use cases will accelerate this trend.

“In any case, software engineering is on track to change substantially. And it will look a lot more like supervising the automation, while pitching in high-level commands, ideas or progression strategies, in English.”

Andrej Karpathy, fmr. OpenAI scientist.

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Here’s a cool way to use AI.

Over the coming weeks, The Neuron will share more practical ways people are using AI to work smarter, not harder.

If you find anything useful, slide into our DMs!

Check this out: an automation that collects product feedback from Reddit, then neatly packages it in an email for the founder.

Max Brodeur-Urbas is a great follow for discovering AI use cases like filling out forms page-by-page!

Around the Horn.

Meta is investing big in AI infrastructure, scooping up 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs that could be worth $3.5-10B.
Screenshots surfaced that GPT-4.5 could be coming soon.
5 out of 45 of this year’s Pulitzer Prize finalists for journalism used AI in some way.
DoorDash launched a new bot called SafeChat+ that detects when a customer or driver is being harassed in the app.

Wednesday Wirings.

AI2 Incubator, an incubator for AI startups, bagged $200M in compute for its companies.
Nanonets, which helps firms extract insights from documents, raised $29M.
Tavus, which creates AI replicas for automated video campaigns, secured $18M.
SuperAGI, a superintelligence research lab, raised $10M.
Pienso, a no-code tool for training LLMs on your business data, raised $10M.
UG Labs, a startup integrating conversational AI into children’s games, nabbed $7M.

A Cat's Commentary.

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