The open-source software developer GitHub says as much as 30% of newly written code on its network is being done with the help of the company's A

Nearly a third of new code on GitHub is written with AI help

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2021-10-27 19:00:20

The open-source software developer GitHub says as much as 30% of newly written code on its network is being done with the help of the company's AI programming tool Copilot.

Why it matters: Copilot can look at code written by a human programmer and suggest further lines or alternative code, eliminating some of the repetitive labor that goes into coding.

How it works: Copilot is built on the OpenAI Codex algorithm, which was trained on terabytes of openly available source code and can translate human language into programming language. It serves as a more sophisticated autocomplete tool for programmers.

Between the lines: The company will announce at its GitHub Universe conference today that it will be rolling out Copilot support for all popular programming languages, including Java.

The catch: Not unlike OpenAI's massive text-generating natural language product GPT-3, Copilot is much more effective in augmenting human work than in creating its own code.