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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#131

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

tux1968 wrote: post #125
jonas_kgomo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking about how this could displace a large portion of developers. How do you see Copilot being more augmentative than disruptive to the developer ecosystem? Also, how you see it different from regular code completion tools like tabnine.

How many jobs have developers helped displace in business and industry? I don't think it's controversial that we become fair game for that same automation process we've been leading.

Indeed. It should be the goal of society to automate away as much work as possible. If there are perverse incentives working against this then we should correct them.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#132

Post by kif »

natfriedman wrote: post #60

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

I visited https://copilot.github.com/, and I don't know how to feel. Obviously it's a nice achievement, not gonna lie.

But I have a feeling it will end up causing more work. e.g. the `averageRuntimeInSeconds` example, I had to spend a bit of time to see if it was actually correct. It has to be, since it's on the front page, but then I realized I'd need to spend time reviewing the AI's code.

It's cool as a toy, but I'd like to see where it is one year from now when the wow factor has cooled down a bit.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#135

Post by brown9-2 »

theden wrote: post #88

Calling it now, there will be a "Copilot considered harmful" post. If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it's correct, you may as well write it yourself? If you glance at it and it looks about right, you can potentially overlook bugs or edge cases, you'll lose confidence in your own code since you didn't properly conceptualise it yourself. Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active exper…

All of the same can be said for copy-and-pasting code you find in a tutorial in Google search results or in a Stack Overflow answer. This just seems to be automating that process even further.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#136

Post by fabiospampinato »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #97
fabiospampinato wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be able to (try to) do something like that too. There's a little demo about that here: https://copilot.github.com/ It's "just" an autocompletion system basically, if you write something that looks like the beginning of a test it should understand that and try to autocomplete that.

I'd say it's more than 'just' an autocomplete system. Naive autocomplete, as implemented in Excel since forever ago (and I'm sure long before that, I'm just familiar with being annoyed by Excel suggesting wrong entries from its simple and over-eager autocomplete system), merely matches a sequence of characters - if I typed "aut" again in this paragraph it will suggest "autocomplete" because I recently typed it. Imple…

I agree, that's why I put the "just" under quotes. It is basically an autocompletion system, just much smarter than human-coded ones in many ways.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#137

Post by Iv »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #29
iwintermute wrote: post #21

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

You bring up a really good point. I'm super curious what the legality and ethics around training machines on licensed or even proprietary code would be. IIRC there are implications around code you can build if you've seen proprietary code (I remember an article from HN about how bash had to be written by someone who hadn't seen the unix shell code or something like that). How would we classify that legally when it co…

I would argue that a trained model falls under the legal category of "compilation of facts".

More generally, keep in mind that the legal world, despite an apparent focus on definition is very bad at dealing with novelty, and most of it will end up justifying a posteriori existing practices.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#139

Post by KMnO4 »

Hamuko wrote: post #127
natfriedman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

> training ML models is fair use How does that apply to countries where Fair Use is not a thing? As in, if you train a model on a fair use basis in the US and I start using the model somewhere else?

I don’t think it’s fair to ask a US company to comment on legalities outside of the US.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#140

Post by Asmod4n »

Hamuko wrote: post #127
natfriedman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

> training ML models is fair use How does that apply to countries where Fair Use is not a thing? As in, if you train a model on a fair use basis in the US and I start using the model somewhere else?

Fair use doesn’t exist in Germany.
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