OpenAI Researchers Find That AI Is Unable to Solve Most Coding Problems

OpenAI researchers have admitted that even the most advanced AI models still are no match for human coders — even though CEO Sam Altman insists they will be able to beat "low-level" software engineers by the end of this year. In a new paper, the company's researchers found that even frontier models, or the most advanced and boundary-pushing AI systems, "are still unable to solve the majority" of coding tasks. The researchers used a newly-developed benchmark called SWE-Lancer, built on more than 1,400 software engineering tasks from the freelancer site Upwork. Using the benchmark, OpenAI put three large language models (LLMs) — its own o1 reasoning model and flagship GPT-4o, as well as Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet — to the test. Specifically, the new benchmark evaluated how well the LLMs performed with two types of tasks from Upwork: individual tasks, which involved resolving bugs and implementing fixes to them, or management tasks that saw the models trying to zoom out and make hig ... Read full article.