Former Top Google Researchers Have Made A New Kind of AI Agent

A new kind of artificial intelligence agent, trained to understand how software is built by gorging on a company’s data and learning how this leads to an end product, could be both a more capable software assistant and a small step towards much smarter AI.

The new agent, called Asimov, was developed by Reflection, a small but ambitious startup confounded by top AI researchers from Google. Asimov reads code as well as emails, Slack messages, project updates and other documentation with the goal of learning how all this leads together to produce a finished piece of software.

Reflection’s ultimate goal is building superintelligent AI—something that other leading AI labs say they are working towards. Meta recently created a new Superintelligence Lab, promising huge sums to researchers interested in joining its new effort.

I visited Reflection’s headquarters in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, New York, just across ...