Artificial intelligence is here to stay and seems to have no limits. From text generation to image and code creation, AI has become increasingly popular and is spreading to more and more fields of activity.
Recently, OpenAI announced the arrival of its new AI model, the GPT-4, which promises a breakthrough in natural language processing. According to its creators, this model is able to better understand human language and generate text more accurately and naturally. So much so that it has been able to create an application from scratch that could have been created by any developer.
A fully functional application in just a few questions
We have already seen in the past that ChatGPT is not only limited to text generation, but can also help us with code. In the case of GPT-4 it is even capable of creating iPhone applications using SwiftUI, Apple’s user interface creation framework.
This is shown to us by Morten Just, a software developer who shared on Twitter how he used GPT-4 to create a movie recommendation app for the iPhone. He only had to ask GPT-4 to use SwiftUI and it told him what features the app should have. Surprisingly, GPT-4 provided the code needed to create the desired app.
As Just tells in his Twitter thread, the result was a fully functional application that displays a list of five different movies with their description and trailer when selecting one of them. In fact, he explained that the first version of the app still had some bugs, but GPT-4 fixed them and, according to him, “even apologized.”
The end of developers?
Not at all. This is not the end of developers, this is the beginning. An application like the one we are talking about is really simple, it can’t be compared by far with applications like Clips, from Apple, for example, or even iMovie. Moreover, GPT, even in its version 4, needs human supervision to correct and detect errors and also to make suggestions and improvements.
That said, the results are simply stunning. And something really hopeful for the development world. For expert developers, being able to have a tool to assist them in repetitive tasks is a great advantage, but there is more. For novice developers, even those of us who simply have an interest in development and are just getting started, this tool is a game changer.
Having a personalized “tutor” that we can ask about the code we are writing, that can detect bugs, make suggestions or simply fill in a piece of code that we are not getting, is another level. An integration of GPT-4 or a similar AI into Xcode or Swift Playgrounds can boost the development world both in productivity and interest from budding developers.
While the app code resulting from this experiment is available on GitHub, and Apple is working on bringing ChatGPT to Siri, the whole project itself along with GPT-4 provides an impressive demonstration of the potential of artificial intelligence in the creation of mobile applications. While there is still much to explore and develop in this field, this AI model is an important step towards the future of programming and technology in general.
