As a teenager growing up in Chicago, Jeff Wang dreamed of directing Hollywood action movies. As head of business at Codeium, an AI coding assistant startup, he’s now choreographing a different kind of action: He’s the glue holding the company’s finance, operations and sales departments together.
“They all have to interconnect,” Wang told The Forecast in a video interview. “I’m just making sure that all the right information is getting to the right place.”
Wang has a knack for immersing himself in some of the most buzzed-about technologies in the world. Known for his insights into the crypto markets through the educational platform RocketFuel, he is now firmly planted in the generative AI space.
He first test drove generative AI when he took GPT-2, the precursor to the headline-grabbing ChatGPT, for a spin. He also tinkered with Stable Diffusion, a generative AI model that produces images. But it was ChatGPT that really made him sit up and take notice. Since it started making waves late in 2022, it has turned on their head enterprises in nearly every industry, from education and entertainment to medicine and manufacturing.
As floored as he was by generative AI, however, Wang was convinced that its best capabilities had not yet been seen. That was in early 2023. Soon thereafter, in May of the same year, he joined Codeium to get in on the AI action firsthand.
AI Coding Assistant: Developer Tested, IT Approved
The return on investment for generative AI isn’t always immediately apparent. Not so with coding projects.
“With coding, the ROI is very, very clear,” Wang said.
Codeium uses generative AI to act as a developer’s assistant, finishing lines of code with autocomplete functionality. Developers can chat with the built-in AI helper and convert tasks to code.
While these features are attractive propositions, the idea of proprietary information leaking out to the wider world through a generative AI prompt is enough to keep IT personnel up at night. For these folks, too, Codeium has an answer.
“If you’re concerned that your code is going to go out into the wilderness, [so] you don’t want to send your IP out there, we have an on-premise or self-hosted solution,” Wang said.
“As a partnership with Nutanix, we even have a bundled solution where you can just send a box to a customer with Codeium on it and it can be hosted entirely in their environment. No data will ever leave the premises. We make it in a way where IT is actually going to approve the coding solution for use.”
Enterprise-Ready Coding Assistant
In a strategic move, Codeium offers a free version of its coding assistant that has over half a million downloads and counting. Having so many customers test driving its product has helped the startup iron out wrinkles.
“It has guided us to what are the most used features,” Wang said. “We can test some of the models we’re training and make sure they’re better than the previous ones.”
Polished versions roll out to enterprise customers, who are knocking in great numbers on Codeium’s doors.
Dell Technologies is one of Codeium’s most notable clients.
“The verticals where we play in the best right now seem to be defense, finance and healthcare, and that’s because they have a very high security requirement where they need to host LLMs on-prem or in an air-gapped environment,” Wang said.
Enterprises find Codeium’s value proposition — making engineers up to 30% more efficient — extremely enticing. Such productivity might mean speedier rollout of applications and faster patches in case of cyberattacks. Ten-fold productivity gains are right around the corner, Wang predicts.
Coding productivity improvements notwithstanding, bottlenecks for software development still exist. Codeium is addressing these speed bumps with a product called Forge, which eases the code review process through LLMs. Codeium pays close attention to the accuracy of the code it generates and ensures a human-in-the-loop element to oversee operations, Wang said.
“We cannot simply just write a bunch of content and ship it out there,” he noted.
The Future of Generative AI
Contrary to some news headlines, Wang doesn’t see the AI momentum slowing down any time soon. While there’s some truth to most of the world’s text data now being a part of LLMs, new avatars of generative AI keep steamrolling ahead, Wang pointed out.
“There’s a concept called LMM, which is a large multimodal model — meaning it will include visuals and sound for generating music and video,” Wang said.
“I think people are underestimating the possibilities because there’s so many more modalities where this technology is going
Nevertheless, it’s a fine line to walk between hitting the ceiling with today’s capabilities and planning for tomorrow’s potential. Wang is making sure Codeium is keeping an eye on ever-moving goalposts and staying abreast of the latest developments in the field.
Up next: multi-step large language models (LLMs) that can perform multiple steps to solve problems.
He said models are evolving quickly, with some already systematically refining their answers in stages. He same more big “wow” capabilities from generative AI are always right around the corner.
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Poornima Apte is a trained engineer turned technology writer. Her specialties include engineering, AI, IoT, automation, robotics, climate tech and cybersecurity. Poornima's original reporting on Indian Americans moving to India in the wake of the country's economic boom won her an award from the South Asian Journalists’ Association. Poornima is a proud member of the Cloud (the sky, not the tech kind) Appreciation Society. Find her at wordcumulus.com.