GITHUB Copilot
GitHub Copilot is a code completion tool developed by GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and OpenAI (49% owned by Microsoft) that assists users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. Currently available by subscription to individual developers and to businesses, the generative artificial intelligence software was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021, and works best for users coding in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go. In March 2023 GitHub announced plans for "Copilot X", which will incorporate a chatbot based on GPT-4, as well as support for voice commands, into Copilot.
HISTORY
On June 29, 2021, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot for technical preview in the Visual Studio Code development environment. GitHub Copilot was released as a plugin on the JetBrains marketplace on October 29, 2021.October 27, 2021, GitHub released the GitHub Copilot Neovim plugin as a public repository. GitHub announced Copilot's availability for the Visual Studio 2022 IDE on March 29, 2022 On June 21, 2022, GitHub announced that Copilot was out of "technical preview", and is available as a subscription-based service for individual developers.
GitHub Copilot is the evolution of the 'Bing Code Search' plugin for Visual Studio 2013, which was a Microsoft Research project released in February 2014. This plugin integrated with various sources, including MSDN and Stack Overflow, to provide high-quality contextually relevant code snippets in response to natural language queries
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IMPLEMENTATION
GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex, which is a modified, production version of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model using deep-learning to produce human-like text. The Codex model is additionally trained on gigabytes of source code in a dozen programming languages.
Copilot’s Open AI Codex is trained on a selection of the English language, public GitHub repositories, and other publicly available source code This includes a filtered dataset of 159 gigabytes of Python code sourced from 54 million public GitHub repositories.
EDUCATION CONCERN
A February 2022 paper released by the Association for Computing Machinery evaluates the impact Codex, the technology used by Github Copilot, may have on the education of novice programmers. The study utilizes assessment questions from an introductory programming class at The University of Auckland and compares Codex’s responses with student performance. Researchers found that Codex, on average, performed better than most students; however, its performance decreased on questions that limited what features could be used in the solution (e.g., conditionals, collections, and loops). Given this type of problem, "only two of [Codex’s] 10 solutions produced the correct output, but both [...] violated [the] constraint." The paper concludes that Codex may be useful in providing a variety of solutions to learners, but may also lead to over-reliance and plagiarism.