DeepMind has created a new system, called AlphaCode, it said can write computer programs at a competitive level using artificial intelligence.

The London-based AI company, which is a subsidiary of BigTech firm Alphabet, said the new system achieved an estimated rank within the top 54 per cent of participants in programming competitions.

These competitions, hosted by online platform Codeforce, involved solving new problems that require a combination of critical thinking, logic, algorithms, coding, and natural language understanding, according to DeepMind.

The company said AlphaCode uses a transformer-based language model to generate code at scale, and then filters to a smaller set of programs from this code.

AlphaCode said this marks the first time an AI code generation system has reached a competitive level of performance in programming competitions.

DeepMind said it will be releasing its dataset of competitive programming problems and solutions on code platform GitHub, which will include tests to ensure the programs that pass these tests are correct.

Alphabet is continuing to expand its AI-based use cases.


The BigTech recently launched a new business, Isomorphic Laboratories, that will use AI for drug discovery and will build on work done by DeepMind.

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