321–330 of 1001 posts
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.
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Have you used any intelligent code completion in the past? E.g. I'd really be interested how it compares to TabNine[0], which already gives pretty amazing single line suggestions (haven't tried their experimental multi-line suggestions yet). [0]: https://www.tabnine.com
I have used IDEs with good knowledge of the types and libraries I'm using (e.g. VSCode with TypeScript). They offer good suggestions once you start typing a function name. But nothing gets close to Copilot. It "understands" what you're trying to do, and writes the code for you. It makes type-based autocompletions useless.
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Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…
> - under what license the generated code falls under? Is it even copyrighted? Generally my understand is that to be copyrightable it has to be the output of a human creative process, this doesn't seem to qualify (I am not a lawyer). See also, monkeys can't hold copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Isn't it subject to the licenses the model was created from, as the learning is basically just an automated transformation of the code, which would be still the original license - as else I could just run some minifier, or some other, more elaborate, code transformation, on some FOSS project, for example the Linux kernel, and relicense it under whatever?
Does not sound right to me, but IANAL and I also did not really look at how this specific model/s is/are generated.
If I did some AI on existing code I'd be quite cautious and group by compatible licences classes, asking the user what their projects licence is and then only use the compatible parts of the models.-Anything else seems not really ethical and rather uncharted territory in law to me, which may not mean much as IANAL and just some random voice on the internet, but FWIW at least I tried to understand quite a few FOSS licences to decide what I can use in projects and what not.
Anybody knows of some relevant cases of AI and their input data the model was from, ideally in jurisdictions being the US or any European Country ones?
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You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it answers all of your questions: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
> You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it answers all of your questions: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs Read it all, and the questions still stand. Could you, or any on your team, point me on where the questions are answered? In particular, the FAQ doesn't assure that the "training set from publicly available data" doesn't contain license or patent violations, nor if that code is considered ta…
> GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.
I'm guessing this covers it. I'm not sure if someone posting their code online, but explicitly saying you're not allowed to look at it, getting ingested into this system with billions of other inputs could somehow make you liable in court for some kind of infringement.
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Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…
Some of your questions aren't easy to answer. Maybe the first two were OK to ask. Others would probably require lawyers and maybe even courts to decide. This is a pretty cool new product just being shared on an online discussion forum. If you are serious about using it for a company, talk to your lawyers, get in touch with Github's people, and maybe hash out these very specific details on the side. Your comment came…
We already do this with libraries and frameworks in a more primitive way. The hard work is actually done by a hand full of programmers, everyone else is sticking pipes together. I don't think that's a bad thing per se, but in my experience most people don't make the distinction. You're not going to be able to write your own database server with this tool if you weren't able to do so without it. If you're one of the f…
Obviously, there's some core algorithmic work that needs to occur, but that's always been done by a very small number of people anyway. The rest is still glueing.
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Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…
Some of your questions aren't easy to answer. Maybe the first two were OK to ask. Others would probably require lawyers and maybe even courts to decide. This is a pretty cool new product just being shared on an online discussion forum. If you are serious about using it for a company, talk to your lawyers, get in touch with Github's people, and maybe hash out these very specific details on the side. Your comment came…
The commenter isn't interrogating some indy programmer. This is a product of a subsidiary of Microsoft, who I guarantee has already had a lawyer, or several, consider these questions.
I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…
I wouldn't be surprised to see really good static analysis and automated code review tools coming out of these teams very soon.
I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…
It's good for our health, too!
As a programmer who specializes in security, I worry that many of the common errors that people make will get picked up the AI and recommended to new users. It looks like it gets reinforcement from the code that the user selects. In my experience the majority of developers make security errors, so how is the algorithm going to learn not to do it the wrong way when it's learning from bad code and getting reinforced by…
Maybe the first generation of this sort of completion will be bad, but I have full faith it will be better than the average human at avoiding security issues as early as the next generation.