Announcing GitHub Copilot

Today, GitHub, OpenAI and Microsoft launched a technical preview of GitHub Copilot, a collaboratively developed new AI pair programmer that helps you write better code. You can learn more about it here and sign up for the preview today—spots are limited, so act quickly if you’re interested. 

It’s a powerful way to enhance developer productivity. Using it for my own development work, I’m impressed by how well the project turned out; it’s helpful in a whole bunch of ways, and it’s only going to get better and better over time. But for me, this announcement is super exciting for a bunch of reasons past the wonder of having an AI assistant that helps make your coding easier (which, to be sure, is sufficiently cool on its own ??). 

Firstly, I think CoPilot is a great and very tangible example of how our ongoing partnership with OpenAI is starting to yield incredibly useful tools created by leveraging huge ML models trained on large-scale infrastructure. We knew from the beginning of our partnership that things like CoPilot were what we wanted to explore together—increased scale delivering a wider breadth of AI capabilities—but it’s beyond satisfying to see our hopes come to life in the real world. 

Further, it’s strong evidence of how much Azure is truly becoming the best option to provide the infrastructure necessary to build and train the massive AI models required to make these kinds of advances possible. As the folks at GitHub and OpenAI collaborate to train and scale up the models powering Copilot, they’re going to have first-class infrastructural support capable of growing and expanding in parallel with their ambitions.  

If you consider all of this together, it’s a pretty convincing argument for how we’re getting closer and closer to the vision I’ve talked about many times in the past—that massive AI models are going to converge to act more as a platform enabling new applications that can help spur creativity and innovation. At Microsoft, we feel strongly that we’re on the right track to provide a world-class AI platform to empower customers, individuals, and creators everywhere.  

That drive to help everybody do more, more easily, is at the heart of what we’re trying to do with GitHub Copilot—to expand the scope of who can be a programmer and make programming more approachable for everyone, while helping seasoned programmers get more quickly to the essence of the problems they are trying to solve. This is just one step in that evolution, but in the meantime, we and our partners are going to keep working on delivering new, super-powerful tools that help human beings do infinitely ingenious, creative, inspiring, awesome stuff.