Monday, 29 January 2024, Bengaluru, India
In 2021, Oleg Klimov, Vlad Guber, and Oleg Kiyasko collaborated to develop Refact.ai. This platform offers consumers greater customization and control over the coding process to persuade more businesses to adopt GenAI.
(Image Source: Techcrunch.com)
Klimov and Kiyasko collaborated to develop AI-based picture identification and security technologies for almost ten years. Since they were neighbors in the South Ukrainian town of Yuzhnoukrainsk, Guber had known Kiyashko since they were little.
In an email conversation with TechCrunch, Klimov stated, “It was evident that AI would change the very notion of engineering.” “Being software engineers at heart, we decided that we needed to create an independent system for software engineering to be in the best position to survive it.”
Most developers know the profound changes AI is bringing about in their field. In a recent HackerRank survey, 82% of participants thought artificial intelligence (AI) would “redefine” the future of coding and software development.
Most developers welcome the move; according to a 2023 study by VC company HeavyBit, 63% of developers said they are currently utilizing GenAI for coding jobs. Employers, however, are still determining. In a different survey, 85% of IT and C-suite executives in enterprises voiced worries about the privacy and security threats associated with GenAI.
Businesses like Apple, Samsung, Walmart, Verizon, Goldman Sachs, and Samsung have restricted internal usage of GenAI products due to data security concerns.
As a “strong junior engineer” or an artificial coworker in a productive team but in need of supervision, Klimov suggested one way to approach it. Refact, however, only requires an internet connection, unlike many, if not most, of its competitors. Klimov asserts that it does not even upload primary telemetry data.
“We’re aware of the challenges that [enterprises] face and want to ensure the integrity of our customers’ information and innovative breakthroughs, so we’re developing better controls and processes around sources and uses of data, security, and privacy,” Klimov added.
Compact, code-generating AI models trained on permissively licensed code power on Refact’s platform, according to Klimov, are another significant competitive advantage. It has been demonstrated that specific code-generating tools introduced on copyrighted or otherwise restively licensed code may reproduce such code when asked in a particular way, which could expose the companies utilizing them to litigation risk (at least in the opinion of some intellectual property experts).
Companies concerned about the intellectual property issues surrounding their GenAI coding tools can now rest easy thanks to the settings and policies vendors like GitHub and Amazon have implemented. However, it’s doubtful that they’ve advanced very far. According to almost one-third of Fortune 500 companies surveyed by Acrolinx in 2023, their top worry regarding the application of generative AI was intellectual property protection.
Refact’s approach to protecting intellectual property and privacy has allowed it to secure $2 million in funding from unidentified investors and complete about 20 pilot projects with business clients. Klimov said the platform is already making money and is expected to make “a few million” dollars this summer through a monthly cloud-hosted plan that starts at $10 per seat.
That is impressive because companies like GitHub have had difficulty profiting from their code-generating products. It was estimated that Copilot’s accompanying cloud processing overhead was costing Microsoft, the parent company of GitHub, up to $80 per user each month.
Shortly, the eight-person Refact team in London will concentrate on improving Refact’s ability to run code independently, carry out “multi-step” plans, and self-test code.
“We’re actively developing a next-generation AI assistant that can work on any sizable codebase and debug the code it writes,” Klimov stated. “We have adequate internal funding and the resources needed to keep developing the product. What helped us was the availability and eagerness of very talented people looking to join the AI revolution and who saw Refact as a place to thrive and develop something that could have a lasting impact. We have never benefited from an abundance of funding or the venture capital frenzy in previous years.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
