Kickstarting AI for Code: Introducing IBM's Project CodeNet

"Software is eating the world," US entrepreneur Marc Andreessen famously wrote in 2011. Fast-forward to today – software is in financial services and healthcare, smartphones and smart homes. Such large volumes of code, however, is a challenge to debug, maintain, and update, especially as enterprises aim to modernize their aging software infrastructure. As a result, we find ourselves in a new age where it's essential to take advantage of today's powerful technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud to create new solutions that can modernize processes across the information technologies (IT) pipeline. A large dataset aimed at teaching AI to code, it consists of some 14M code samples and about 500M lines of code in more than 55 different programming languages, from modern ones like C, Java, Python, and Go to legacy languages like COBOL, Pascal, and FORTRAN.