I’m thrilled to share that Cade Metz of the New York Times featured Gado Images in a major story about OpenAI’s Codex platform, as well as our 10+ years using Artificial Intelligence to process historical archives.

Read the New York Times story

Codex is a groundbreaking new AI platform that can write computer code automatically using only simple instructions written in plain language. Based on our previous work with OpenAI’s GPT-3, Gado Images was given the exciting job of testing Codex just five days after the system launched.

“As soon as Tom Smith got his hands on Codex — a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs — he gave it a job interview,” Metz writes in the Times piece. In Gado Images’ testing, the system performed surprisingly well, writing complex programs--as well as translating between programming languages--automatically.

Want to dig into our testing in more detail? Check out this article I wrote about the technical details of our time spent testing Codex.

We put Codex through its paces in several programming-specific tests. Ultimately, though, systems like Codex are interesting even if you’re not a programmer. Like many of today’s AI tools, it promises to enhance the productivity of skilled humans, rather than threatening them with replacement.

In the New York Times piece, Metz saw a parallel between Codex and Gado Images’ archival AI, which has evolved to help our human researchers rather than replacing their important work.

In Metz’s words, “Gado Images…set out to build a system that could automatically sort through the photo archives of newspapers and libraries…But the technology could handle only part of the job. It could sift through a vast photo archive faster than humans, identifying the kinds of images that might be useful and taking a stab at captions. But finding the best and most important photos and properly tagging them still required a seasoned archivist.”

Ultimately, AI works best when it complements the work of skilled humans--whether those humans are writing code or processing historical photos. Tools like Codex will continue to grow and evolve. Companies that integrate these tools into their workflows in a way that enhances the skills of their talented people will benefit the most from the future of AI.

Read more about GPT-3, the AI system which underlies Codex

Gado Images

The New York Times Features Gado Images