Building artificial intelligence: Reward is not enough
OpenAI has once again made the headlines, this time with Copilot, an AI-powered programming tool jointly built with GitHub. Built on top of GPT-3, OpenAI’s famous language model, Copilot is an autocomplete tool that provides relevant (and sometimes lengthy) suggestions as you write code.
Copilot is currently available to select applicants as an extension in Visual Studio Code, the flagship programming tool of Microsoft, GitHub’s parent company.
While the AI-powered code generator is still a work in progress, it provides some interesting hints about the business of large language models and the future directions of the software industry.
The official website of Copilot describes it as an “AI pair programmer” that suggests “whole lines or entire functions right inside your editor.” Sometimes, just providing a function signature or description is enough to generate an entire block of code.
Working behind Copilot is a deep learning model called Codex, which is basically a special version of GPT-3 finetuned for programming tasks. The tool’s working is very much like GPT-3: It takes a prompt as input and generates a sequence of bytes as output. Here, the prompt (or context) is the source code file you’re working on and the output is the code suggestion you receive.
