Open AI releases Code Interpreter and the internet goes wild

Coders, professors and AI influencers have all been playing with a new ChatGPT tool – released last week to paid for subscribers – which claims to be able to be able to carry out many of the tasks traditionally associated with data analysts.

At the end of last week Open AI released one of its own in-house plug-ins Code Interpreter as a beta product to all of its ChatGPT Plus members, who typically pay $20 a month for the service.

Code Interpreter, as the name suggests, is an AI system capable of understanding, writing, and executing Python code. This enables users to upload their own files (of up to 100MB) and ask GPT to run code that allows the AI to analyse data, create charts, edit files and perform maths.

Early reaction from ChatGPT Plus users and tech influencers has been overwhelmingly positive.

Data science specialist Soner Yidirim wrote a blog over the weekend about how he used the tool to create an interactive world map of country populations with a couple of sentences.

“I used it on a task, which could take me a couple of hours to complete. Depending on your task and familiarity with Python libraries, this task could even take longer,” he wrote.

“Using ChatGPT, I only had to write a couple of sentences and upload two CSV files,” he added.

On LinkedIn meanwhile, Linas Beliunas, a county manager for payments tech firm Flutterwave, hailed the app as Open AI’s “most powerful feature since unlocking GPT-4 to everyone” – and proclaimed that “anyone can be a data analyst now”.

In a much reposted article Beliunas goes on to list ten use cases, including an example of how Code Interpreter was used to do an exploratory data analysis of Bitcoin – complete with a downloadable stock dataset – all from an iPhone.

Gaming

And the AI is not just being used as an impromptu data analyst – among those to have been singing its praises on twitter is an AI lecturer at Columbia University who detailed how she was able to create a game using Code Intepreter in five minutes.

Code Interpreter in ChatGPT is incredible! Took me 5 mins to make this game.

You can make your own game assets with any AI generator and then ask GPT-4 with Code Interpreter to write code. If you have any problems you can ask it to fix the errors.

1. Write this prompt: “write… pic.twitter.com/cqWpcfVq9J

— Kris Kashtanova (@icreatelife) July 9, 2023

So, given its resounding success within only a few days of launching, should data analysts be worried?

AI influencer and associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania thinks not.

Writing on his Substack newsletter Mollick said that Code Interpreter offers the strongest case yet for AI as a valuable companion.

While human oversight remains crucial, he maintained, the new feature reduces the repetitive work and mundane fiddley tasks like data merging and cleaning, thus enabling more meaningful, in-depth work.

“Code Interpreter represents the clearest positive vision so far of what AIs can mean for work: Disruption, yes, but disruption that leads to better, more meaningful work,” he said.