OpenAI hiring hundreds of contractors from different parts of the globe to help ChatGPT get better at coding, according to reporting from Semafor.
More specifically, the company is looking for computer programmers to create training data that will include lines of code as well as natural language explanations of the code.
OpenAI already has a ChatGPT model called Codex that is specifically designed for translating natural language into code. Codex was trained on data scraped from GitHub, Microsoft’s code repository, before its launch in 2021.
It’s good enough for Microsoft to use Codex to power GitHub Copilot, a service that assists programmers in writing code.
Recent research, however, suggests that adding ChatGPT’s unique ability to converse with humans could improve coding assistance. As a result, it’s not surprising that OpenAI is investing in this area by hiring more contractors. Meanwhile, Stack Overflow, a programming-related Q&A site, has banned ChatGPT-generated answers because even low-quality answers can sound plausible.
According to Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, in order to truly advance a coding assistant, researchers would need to build “a system capable of anticipating the effect of its own actions,” as well as have “some sort of internal world model, a mental model of how the world is going to change as a result of its own actions.”
