CODEX - Code Companion

Codex is a natural language processing model that translates English language to Computer Code. Yes, its now possible to make your computer work through human language instead of programming languages. Super cool right ? Now, just imagine Codex as super human developer who is excellent in Python programming and also proficient in over a dozen other languages such as Javascript, Typescript, Go, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Shell. Codex is OpenAI's flagship product to generate code using English instructions and execute them on user's behalf producing the required output.

TRAINING

Codex is a specialized GPT-3 model fine-tuned on billions of lines of code from publicly available resources, including Github's public repositories . It was mainly trained with the goal of researching the code generating capabilities of the model in Python language.The training dataset was collected in May 2020 from 54 million public software repositories hosted on GitHub, containing 179 GB of unique Python files under 1 MB. Files which were likely auto-generated, had average line length greater than 100, had maximum line length greater than 1000, or contained a small percentage of alphanumeric characters. were filtered resulting in the final dataset of 159 GB.

MEMORY

GPT-3 has a memory of only 4KB , but Codex has a memory of 14KB (for Python code). Thus, codex can remember 3x times more contextual information during task execution

NO-CODE TOOL

You can give instructions in English and the corresponding working code is generated using codex API. Codex empowers computers to better understand people's intent in their own language instead of programming language. Thus people with little to no coding knowledge can also develop software applications using codex.

HOW CODEX CAN HELP CODERS ?

Writing code to build a product involves 2 main tasks:

1. The task of breaking a problem into simpler problems

2. The task of mapping the simpler problems to the existing codes (libraries, functions, APIs).

Codex excels the most at this second task of programming.

APPLICATIONS OF CODEX

Codex is a general-purpose programming model which can be applied to any programming task.

OpenAI team has successfully used it for explaining code, refactoring code and transpilation( source code written in a programming language is translated into an equivalent source code in the same or a different programming language).

Apart from developing applications from scratch using codex, codex has also made it possible to build a natural language interface for existing applications.

A distinct production version of Codex powers the Github copilot

CODEX DEMOS

The following are some codex demos released by OpenAI team:

1.Giving voice instructions using codex

2. Codex as Transpiler (Convert Python code to Ruby code)

3. Data Science using Codex

4. Codex Live Demo