However, the use of publicly available data for training the AI model has raised concerns about copyright claims and open source licensing violations. GitHub suggests making repositories private to prevent them from being included in future training sets. There are also concerns about the AI model's tendency to introduce buggy or deprecated code snippets. Despite these issues, GitHub is committed to empowering developers with AI tools. Meanwhile, GitHub faces competition from Amazon's CodeWhisperer and startups like Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, and Laredo, as well as open source models like Meta’s Code Llama and Hugging Face’s and ServiceNow’s StarCoder.
Key takeaways:
- GitHub has launched Copilot Chat, a programming-centric chatbot, in general availability for all users. It is available in the sidebar in Microsoft’s IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio, and is free for verified teachers, students and maintainers of certain open source projects.
- Copilot Chat is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s flagship generative AI model, and can provide real-time guidance to developers, including explaining concepts, detecting vulnerabilities or writing unit tests.
- There have been class action lawsuits filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI over alleged open source licensing and IP violations. GitHub suggests codebase owners make their repositories private to prevent them from being included in future training sets.
- GitHub faces competition from Amazon's CodeWhisperer and startups like Magic, Tabnine, Codegen and Laredo, as well as open source models like Meta’s Code Llama and Hugging Face’s and ServiceNow’s StarCoder.