April 2, 2024
There are lots of new models, including one from Apple, but that’s hardly news. AI news is infiltrating other sections of Trends (particularly Programming and Security)—but that’s also hardly news. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that AI will replace coding—but again, he’s not the first. But what’s new is Devin: an AI software engineer from Cognition Labs. Its makers claim that it “can execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions. Devin can recall relevant context at every step, learn over time, and fix mistakes.” Devin is in early access; what we’ve heard from those who’ve used it is that it’s far from finished—but even in that state, it’s very impressive. There’s also an open source OpenDevin project on GitHub.
A supply chain attack added a back door to Linux systems through the widely used xz package. Fortunately, this attack was discovered before the package was incorporated into the leading Linux distributions. However, the attack raises a lot of troubling questions about security—including the question of how we know software is trustworthy. The attack wasn’t discovered by security experts analyzing the code; social engineering may even have been used to prevent it from being tested adequately. The attack was discovered by an engineer who noticed some performance anomalies. Nobody knows who the maintainer who inserted the ...
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