GitHub’s Copilot Chat: Innovation or Revolution?

github announced the launch copilot chat , chat A bot, similar to ChatGPT and oriented to programming, for all its users.

earlier Copilot Chat was available exclusively for corporate clients and individual Copilot subscription users for $ 10 per month. Now this service has become available for a wide audience without restrictions.

Copilot Chat is integrated into the IDE Microsoft side panel, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, and is included in the Github Copilot paid tariffs. This service is free for trusted teachers, students and participants in certain open source projects.

“As a house for world developers, we brought to the market the most widely used AI tool for developers in history,” said Shuin Zhao, vice president of products management in Github.

Copilot Chat operates on the basis of the GPT-4 model from Openai, configured specifically for software development. Developers can ask questions in a natural language, for example, ask for explanation of concepts, find vulnerabilities or write modular tests.

However, questions arise regarding copyright and intellectual property, since the GPT-4 studied on public data, some of which are protected by copyright. GITHUB claims that the doctrine Fair use protects them from copyright claims, but this does not stop programmers from filing collective lawsuits.

Answering the question of excluding the code from data for training, Jao noted the absence of new mechanisms for this purpose as part of the global launch of Copilot Chat. She advised the owners of the code to transfer their repositories to private mode to prevent their use in future training sets.

It is also noted that the generative AI models, including the GPT-4, can hallucinate or create inaccurate facts, which is a programming problem. Stanford’s study showed , showed , that developers using AI assistants for coding often produce less safe code.

/Reports, release notes, official announcements.