GitHub Inc. said today that his artificial intelligence-powered Copilot tool, designed to make developers’ lives easier, is now publicly available to individual developers for $ 10 a month or $ 100 a year, offering a free 60-day trial.
The company launched Copilot in beta in June 2021 and described the tool as an “AI pair programmer”. Copilot aims to help developers by offering the next line of code while writing in an integrated development environment such as JetBrains IDE, Neovim or Microsoft Visual Studio Code. In addition to offering code, it can also offer complete methods and more sophisticated algorithms when needed.
In a blog post, GitHub CEO Thomas Domke said that the GitHub Copilot was designed as an extension for the editor to ensure that nothing interferes with what developers are doing.
“GitHub Copilot distills the collective knowledge of global developers into an editor extension that offers real-time code to help you stay focused on what’s important: building great software,” he explained.
According to Dohmke, about 1.2 million developers have tested Copilot throughout the preview phase. Apparently it was also quite useful, with Dohmke claiming to have written up to 40% of developer code written in popular languages such as Python.
“Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe that AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool for easier and faster code writing,” Domke said.
Code automation could become the next competitive area in software development. Last year, DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., demonstrated an AI system called AlphaCode, which is also very capable of writing software code. DeepMind is testing AlphaCode against a third coding platform called Codeforces, and has achieved a predictive rank that puts it in the top 54% of coders – not perfect, but certainly an upgradeable achievement.
However, there was some controversy surrounding the use of AI in coding. In the case of Copilot, the tool is powered by OpenAI Codex, a language model that has been trained on billions of lines of publicly available source code and natural language data, as well as code available in GitHub’s public repositories.
This reliance on open source training data clearly irritated the Free Software Foundation, which described Copilot as “unacceptable and unfair.” The Foundation questioned whether Copilot’s training on freely licensed code was “fair use”. This is a problem because Copilot is not a free service in itself, but rather a paid service that is used as a software replacement, the foundation said.
In addition to copyright issues, a December study found that Copilot could be a security issue, with up to 40% of its source code containing vulnerabilities.
GitHub did not appear to address any of these complaints today, but at least acknowledged its open source commitment.
“The GitHub Copilot would not be possible without the GitHub community of students and creators,” Domke said. “To support and bring back these communities, we are making GitHub Copilot free for proven students and supporting popular open source projects.”
Image: GitHub
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