What is Google's AlphaCode 2?

Check out the technical paper for more details below.

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One of the pet topics of this publication in 2023 has been how AI is impacting the role of software engineers, the future of code and transforming the future of the software engineering and programming professions.

As such, we have to take a closer look at AlphaCode 2.

DeepMind’s LLM prowess in coding is called AlphaCode and presumably they have upgraded it with the second edition about a year later.

Has Alphacode 2 Reached Human Programming Level?

Alpha Code's largest model had 41.4 billion parameters and was trained using 715 gigabytes of code samples from GitHub. After training, AlphaCode solved 34.2 % of all problems in the CodeContests dataset and achieved an average score in the top 54.3 % in ten Codeforce competitions. This means that AlphaCode outperformed almost 46 % of the human participants.

Guet AI for Developers is Open for BUsiness

Here we also have to understand that Google is going up against Microsoft. Duet AI for Developers, the suite of AI-powered assistance tools for code completion and generation the company announced earlier this year, is now generally available and that it will start making use of Google’s more powerful Gemini model in the coming weeks.

How Good is Alpha Code 2?

AlphaCode 2 can understand programming challenges involving “complex” math and theoretical computer science. And, among other reasonably sophisticated techniques, AlphaCode 2 is capable of dynamic programming, explains DeepMind research scientist Rémi Leblond in a prerecorded video.

When AlphaCode 2 was tested on 77 problems across 12 CodeForces contests – where it competed against more than 8,000 programmers in total – it managed to solve 43 percent of them. AlphaCode 2 submitted its answers in C++.

In two contests out of the twelve in which it competed, AlphaCode 2 outperformed 99.5 percent of participants. Although impressive, the competition conditions were different for the machine and for humans.