RPIrates: Fun with OpenAI, GPTStudio and R!

Abstract

Seemingly everyone has been talking about the impact of OpenAI's ChatGPT on, well, everything​, including writing code. In this very special RPIrates we talk specifically about generating great, and sometimes not-so-great, R code based on OpenAI's "Codex" models, which are easily accessed via the OpenAI API with the help of RStudio extensions (addins) provided by the GPTStudio package. After a quick icebreaker in which we demo GPTStudio in action, we briefly review transformer neural networks; we talk about how code completion tools like Microsoft's IntelliCode Compose apply TNN frameworks to write scarily excellent code; we tour OpenAI's Codex documentation; and then we get back to more hands-on with GPTstudio. We also talk about why code completion frameworks like Codex are so great at Python and Javascript but spotty with R, and of course, the ethics; oh, the ethics!​ Many links for further learning and research are provided.