Can AI actually write code? What GitHub Copilot revealed about the future of programming.
A tool that autocompletes entire functions - and made developers question their job security.
The answer
Launched as a technical preview in June 2021 and made generally available in June 2022, GitHub Copilot was built on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of GPT-3 fine-tuned on billions of lines of public code. Studies showed that developers using Copilot completed tasks 55% faster on average. By 2023, Copilot was generating an average of 46% of code in files where it was enabled across supported languages. The tool sparked debates about open-source licensing, since it was trained on publicly available code, leading to a class-action lawsuit filed in November 2022.
Source: GitHub Blog
- github copilot
- code generation
- developer tools
- openai
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