While some are predicting AI will spell the end for humanity, others like French game studio Ubisoft have been putting our artificially intelligent friends work.
The Assassin’s Creed developer has trained an AI tool called Commit Assistant to spot when programmers are about to mess up, preemptively fixing bugs before they’ve been written into existence.
In an interview with Wired, Yves Jacquier, the person responsible for overseeing Ubisoft’s R&D department in Montreal, revealed how Commit works, explaining it’s been fed around a decades’ worth of code so it can understand how mistakes are made and figure out how to correct them.
“It’s all about comparing the lines of code we’ve created in the past, the bugs that were created in them, and the bugs that were corrected, and finding a way to make links [between them] to provide us with a super-AI for programmers,” he said.
Ubisoft believes that preventing such mistakes could save a lot of cash — around 70 percent of costs, to be exact — but working Commit into the day-to-day development pipeline isn’t exactly straightforward.
“You need a tremendous amount of data, but also a tremendous amount of power to crunch the data and all the mathematical methods,” continues Jacquier. “That [allows] the AI to make that prediction with enough accuracy so that the developer trusts the recommendation.”
You can find out more about Ubisoft’s flirtation with artificial intelligence by checking out the full article over on Wired.