Microsoft-owned GitHub today released its Copilot AI tool, which helps suggest lines of code to developers in its code editor. GitHub originally partnered with OpenAI last year to release a preview of Copilot, and it’s available to all developers today.
Priced at $10 per month or $100 per year, GitHub Copilot is able to suggest the next line of code when developers write in an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDE. Copilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms as well as boilerplate code and help with unit testing.
Over 1.2 million developers have signed up to use GitHub Copilot Preview in the past 12 months and it will continue to be a free tool for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects. In the files where it is activated, GitHub indicates that almost 40% of the code is now written by Copilot.
“Much 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 to write code easier and faster so that ‘they can be happier in their lives,’ says CEO of GitHub. Thomas Dohmke.
Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the research company now run by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, led to the creation of GitHub Copilot. It is based on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language generation algorithm. However, GitHub Copilot has been controversial. Just days after its preliminary release, questions have been raised about the legality of Copilot training on publicly available code posted on GitHub. Aside from copyright issues, a study also found that about 40% of Copilot’s output contained security flaws.
Microsoft isn’t the only company working on automated AI tools to help with coding. Last year, Google-owned DeepMind unveiled an artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode, designed to write computer programs “at a competitive level”. AlphaCode was tested with Codeforces, a competitive coding platform, and earned an “estimated score” that placed it in the top 54% of human coders. The challenges are different from what a normal coder would face, but they demonstrate how AI coding systems can help coders in the future.
GitHub Pilot is available today for all developers with a 60-day free trial. GitHub will bring Pilot to enterprises later this year.
