Bugs Faster than the Speed of Thought
I got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 last year and one of the first things I did was prompt it with a C++ interface struct and have it write the implementation. I was generally surprised by the results. Some of the completions were even code that was clearly from Github projects with valid Github links. My thought was “Wow, this would be an impressive auto-complete”. Today, Github just released Copilot, which is a GPT-3 powered auto-complete feature. It’s very impressive.
Anybody who has created a production AI system will know that only 20% of the work goes into creating the models, the scaffolding around it is the remaining 80%. I’m sure it took a lot of work to go from using the GPT-3 playground to something well integrated into an IDE like Copilot.
Being well integrated is key to the success of Copilot and it’s going to be used by hundreds of thousands if not a million programmers very quickly. Which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.
