On June 29, 2021, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot for technical preview in the Visual Studio Code development environment.[1][4] GitHub Copilot was released as a plugin on the JetBrains marketplace on October 29, 2021.[5] October 27, 2021, GitHub released the GitHub Copilot Neovim plugin as a public repository.[6] GitHub announced Copilot's availability for the Visual Studio 2022 IDE on March 29, 2022.[7] On June 21, 2022, GitHub announced that Copilot was out of "technical preview", and is available as a subscription-based service for individual developers.[8]
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.[9] 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.[10]
Features
When provided with a programming problem in natural language, Copilot is capable of generating solution code.[11] It is also able to describe input code in English and translate code between programming languages.[11]
According to its website, GitHub Copilot includes assistive features for programmers, such as the conversion of code comments to runnable code, and autocomplete for chunks of code, repetitive sections of code, and entire methods and/or functions.[2][12] GitHub reports that Copilot's autocomplete feature is accurate roughly half of the time; with some Python function header code, for example, Copilot correctly autocompleted the rest of the function body code 43% of the time on the first try and 57% of the time after ten attempts.[2]
GitHub states that Copilot's features allow programmers to navigate unfamiliar coding frameworks and languages by reducing the amount of time users spend reading documentation.[2]
Implementation
GitHub Copilot was initially powered by the OpenAI Codex,[13] which is a modified, production version of GPT-3.[14] The Codex model is additionally trained on gigabytes of source code in a dozen programming languages. Copilot's OpenAI Codex was trained on a selection of the English language, public GitHub repositories, and other publicly available source code.[2] This includes a filtered dataset of 159 gigabytes of Python code sourced from 54 million public GitHub repositories.[15] OpenAI's GPT-3 is licensed exclusively to Microsoft, GitHub's parent company.[16]
In November 2023, Copilot Chat was updated to use OpenAI's GPT-4 model.[17] In 2024, Copilot began allowing users to choose between different large language models, such as GPT-4o or Claude 3.5.[3]
Reception
Since Copilot's release, there have been concerns with its security and educational impact, as well as licensing controversy surrounding the code it produces.[18][11][19]
Licensing controversy
While GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stated in June 2021 that "training ML systems on public data is fair use",[20] a class-action lawsuit filed in November 2022 called this "pure speculation", asserting that "no Court has considered the question of whether 'training ML systems on public data is fair use.'"[21] The lawsuit from Joseph Saveri Law Firm, LLP challenges the legality of Copilot on several claims, ranging from breach of contract with GitHub's users, to breach of privacy under the CCPA for sharing PII.[22][21]
GitHub admits that a small proportion of the tool's output may be copied verbatim, which has led to fears that the output code is insufficiently transformative to be classified as fair use and may infringe on the copyright of the original owner.[18] In June 2022, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it would end all uses of GitHub in its own projects,[23] accusing Copilot of ignoring code licenses used in training data.[24] In a customer-support message, GitHub stated that "training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community",[21] but the class action lawsuit called this "false" and additionally noted that "regardless of this concept's level of acceptance in 'the machine learning community,' under Federal law, it is illegal".[21]
FSF white papers
On July 28, 2021, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) published a funded call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot.[25] Donald Robertson, the Licensing and Compliance Manager of the FSF, stated that "Copilot raises many [...] questions which require deeper examination."[25] On February 24, 2022, the FSF announced they had received 22 papers on the subject and using an anonymous review process chose 5 papers to highlight.[26]
Privacy concerns
The Copilot service is cloud-based and requires continuous communication with the GitHub Copilot servers.[27] This opaque architecture has fueled concerns over telemetry and data mining of individual keystrokes.[28][29]
↑ "Bing Code Search". Microsoft Research. 11 February 2014. Retrieved 5 September 2023.
1 2 3 Finnie-Ansley, James; Denny, Paul; Becker, Brett A.; Luxton-Reilly, Andrew; Prather, James (14 February 2022). "The Robots Are Coming: Exploring the Implications of OpenAI Codex on Introductory Programming". Australasian Computing Education Conference. ACE '22. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp.10–19. doi:10.1145/3511861.3511863. ISBN978-1-4503-9643-1. S2CID246681316.
1 2 3 4 Butterick, Matthew (3 November 2022). "GitHub Copilot litigation"(PDF). githubcopilotlitigation.com. Joseph Saveri Law Firm. Archived from the original on 3 November 2022. Retrieved 12 February 2023.
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