OpenAI announces Codex, a code-generating version of GPT-3
OpenAI announced Codex on 10 August 2021 and opened a private beta. The model, a version of GPT-3 fine-tuned on public source code, turned plain-English instructions into working code across several programming languages in live demonstrations.
Why it mattered Codex was already supplying GitHub Copilot’s suggestions, and its unveiling made code generation a named application of large language models.
Corrections
- 2026-09-13: Replaced the Wikipedia overview with OpenAI’s primary announcement published on 2021-08-10.