Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
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Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#2"While we built next-generation experiences for developers, our business failed in two important ways.
First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet.
We built the most-advanced AI for helping developers, but it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough. You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot has a number of issues preventing it from being widely adopted.
The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context. We made some progress towards better models for code, but the problem is very engineering intensive. It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet.
Nonetheless, we could have built a successful business without 10×’ing developer productivity using AI, and we did not do that.
We failed to build a business because our product did not monetize, and it took too long to figure that out."
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#3> First, we failed to deliver our vision of AI-assisted programming because we were 10+ years too early to market, i.e. the tech is not ready yet.
That's not the same thing as being too early to the market. That simply means you didn't have a solution capable of solving a problem.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#4Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#5Netscape open-sourcing their code is what led to Firefox and an open Web, as a counterweight to closed source browsers. Safari took WebKit from Konqueror
I wish more projects would do this
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#6What an honest, transparent message. Kudos.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#7>> It may cost over $100 million to build a production-quality tool capable of synthesizing code reliably, and nobody has tried that quite yet.
$100 million is nothing tbh.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#8Kite rejected me for a position years ago which motivated me to go raise $1M from the NSF to research AI-based dev tools before I moved on to Microsoft.
They seemed like a really cool team, I wish them the best.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#9> it fell short of the 10× improvement required to break through because today’s state of the art for ML on code is not good enough. You can see this in Github Copilot, which is built by Github in collaboration with Open AI. As of late 2022, Copilot has a number of issues preventing it from being widely adopted.
True, AI assisted coding does not deliver 10x. But as a user of another AI assistant, I feel that it gives me ~1.25x to ~2x improvement for the keyboard typing when I code. And that is respectable too :) AI for me currently allows me to tab complete some things that previously an IDE on its own was not able to.
Re: Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
#10> The largest issue is that state-of-the-art models don’t understand the structure of code, such as non-local context.
Depending on how local he's talking, this isn't really true of Copilot. In my experience it will use context all the way up to the top of the file, even in very long files. And at least the Rust version even seems to look at the imports—if you have a use declaration it will actually correctly build and use structs in other files regardless of whether you've yet used them in the current file.