Cognition, a US-based applied AI lab specializing in reasoning, has unveiled Devin, the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer. This groundbreaking development prompts a reevaluation of the future of work, especially in the tech industry, where AI’s role is increasingly significant.
Devin represents a major leap forward in AI technology, designed to work alongside human engineers or independently complete tasks for review. “Devin is a tireless, skilled teammate, equally ready to build alongside you or independently complete tasks for you to review,” Cognition states, highlighting the AI’s ability to tackle complex engineering tasks that require thousands of decisions, recall relevant context at every step, learn over time, and correct its mistakes.
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Devin’s Capabilities: Beyond Traditional AI
Devin’s skill set includes learning new technologies, building and deploying apps end-to-end, autonomously finding and fixing bugs in codebases, training and fine-tuning AI models, addressing bugs and feature requests in open-source repositories, and contributing to mature production repositories. This AI software engineer also features developer tools such as the shell, code editor, and browser within a sandboxed computing environment, facilitating real-time collaboration with users, accepting feedback, and making design choices as needed.
In a real-world test, Devin was given a job on Upwork to write and debug code for a computer vision model. Additionally, Devin underwent evaluation on SWE-bench, a rigorous benchmark that tasks agents with addressing genuine GitHub issues sourced from open-source projects. Devin achieved an end-to-end resolution rate of 13.86%, significantly surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performance.
Who is Cognition?
Cognition, headquartered in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, aims to build “AI teammates” with capabilities far beyond current standards. The company has raised $21M in a Series A round led by Founders Fund, with backing from industry leaders such as Patrick and John Collison, Elad Gil, and others.
This introduction of Devin by Cognition marks a pivotal moment in the integration of AI into the software engineering field, offering a glimpse into a future where AI and human collaboration could redefine the landscape of technology development and application.
