Cosine, a UK-based AI startup, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding and announced that it is the “world’s best AI software developer.” And that claim is justified! Their AI model, called Genie, scored 30.08% on SWE-Bench, the industry standard for evaluating software engineering skills in AI models, setting a new cutting-edge benchmark.
This score represents a significant leap forward, surpassing Factory Code Droid’s previous best of 19.27%. Genie’s performance eclipses other well-known AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, which only achieved 1.31% in the same benchmark.
Cosine’s approach to developing Genie focuses on mimicking human thought processes in software development. The company trained Genie using proprietary data that codifies human problem-solving processes and is based on real-world examples of software developers at work.
Alistair Pullen, CEO of Cosine, said: “Our breakthrough in codifying human thought enables us to train AI models to perform well beyond the narrow scope of tasks currently available to software development teams.”
Genie can debug, build features, and refactor code either autonomously or in collaboration with human developers. The AI also integrates with GitHub and streamlines workflow by directly importing issues and creating detailed work specifications. This feature, combined with precise file identification and in-place editing capabilities, makes Genie an invaluable asset for development teams looking to streamline their workflows and increase productivity.
The $2.5 million seed round was led by SOMA and Uphonest Capital, with participation from Lakestar and Focal. Ellen Ma, partner at Uphonest Capital, noted, “Cosine is essentially teaching AI to think and providing companies with a true AI colleague.”
Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator, Cosine operates out of San Francisco and London. The company plans to expand Genie’s capabilities to cover more programming languages and frameworks and explore both smaller models for simpler tasks and larger models for complex challenges.
As AI software development continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Cosines Genie sets a new benchmark for the industry, but with ongoing investment and developments in this space, further advancements and competition are likely to emerge.
