@adlrocha - The siege of open source software?
Github Copilot’s beta is out! And with it, a heated debate on the use of open source software by big tech companies. For those of you who haven’t read about it yet, Github Copilot is an AI tool in the form of (at least for now) a VS Code extension that helps you write code by “giving suggestions for whole lines or entire functions inside your editor”. Github Copilot is powered by Open AI, and is trained on billions of lines of public code to achieve its task. It uses an OpenAI engine called OpenAI Codex which is a more capable engine than GPT-3 in code generation (in the end it seems to be a GPT-3 trained on billions of lines of code).
So far so good, it is not as if Github Copilot was the first AI tool of its kind to help developers in their job of writing code. You are probably familiar with Tabnine, which has been around for a few years now and does basically the same as Github Copilot.
What’s all the fuss about then? Well, it may have been implicit for the case of Tabnine, but as it was a small startup no one really cared that much, but in the case of Github Copilot is blatant: these tools have been trained using the code you’ve worked so hard to produce, and they are suggesting snippets of it to other developers.
