Today, GitHub (which belongs to Microsoft) launched the Copilot AI tool. As the name implies, artificial intelligence will help developers inside their code editor suggesting lines of code. But this is not new. We mean a year ago GitHub announced that it is teaming up with OpenAI to work on Copilot.
The Copilot AI costs $10 per month or $100 a year. As said above, it will suggest the next line of code as developers type in an integrated development environment (IDE) like Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs. It’s not a simple suggestion we used to see in any code editor. Instead, Copilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms.
In the past 12 months, when GitHub launched the previous Copilot AI, the number of registered developers exceeded 1.2 million. Moreover, it will charge nothing from verified students and maintainers of popular open-source projects. Interestingly, in editors where it’s ON, Copilot writes approximately 40% of the code.
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“Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code easier and faster so they can be happier in their lives,” says GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
Not All Developers Like GitHub Copilot AI
You should also know that it costs a lot of money to make. Microsoft has already invested over $1 billion into OpenAI. The Copilot AI tool uses OpenAI Codex as the core. It’s a descendant of OpenAI’s flagship GPT-3 language-generating algorithm.
However, not everyone likes what GitHub Copilot does. Immediately after the launch of the preview, there were questions over the legality of Copilot. In other words, people were wondering whether it has access to codes to GitHub. If even not talking about the copyright issues, there was a study showing around 40% of Copilot’s output contained security vulnerabilities.
This field will progress more in the future. And in this sense, the Redmond-based company is not the only firm working on automated AI tools to help assist with coding. Something identical is offered by Google-owned DeepMind. Its AI system named AlphaCode can write computer programs “at a competitive level.”
