\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, GitHub rolled out<\/a>\u00a0Copilot Chat<\/a>, a ChatGPT<\/a>-like programming-centric chatbot, for organizations subscribed to Copilot for Business<\/a>. Copilot Chat more recently<\/a> came to individual Copilot<\/a> customers \u2014 those paying $10 per month \u2014 in beta. And now, GitHub\u2019s launching Chat in general availability for all users.<\/p>\n As of today, Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar in Microsoft\u2019s IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio \u2014 included as a part of GitHub Copilot paid tiers and free for verified teachers, students and maintainers of certain open source projects.<\/p>\n \u201cAs home to the world\u2019s developers, we\u2019ve brought to market what is now the most widely adopted AI developer tool in history,\u201d Shuyin Zhao, VP of product management at GitHub, told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cAnd code complete was just the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n Little else about Copilot Chat has changed since the beta.<\/p>\n The chatbot\u2019s still powered by GPT-4<\/a>, OpenAI\u2019s flagship generative AI model, fine-tuned specifically for dev scenarios. Developers can prompt Copilot Chat in natural language to get real-time guidance, for example asking Copilot Chat to explain concepts, detect vulnerabilities or write unit tests.<\/p>\n Like all generative AI models, the model underpinning Copilot Chat, GPT-4, was trained on publicly available data \u2014 some of which is copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Vendors including GitHub argue fair use<\/a> doctrine shields them from copyright claims. But that hasn\u2019t stopped coders from filing<\/a> class action lawsuits against GitHub, Microsoft (GiHub\u2019s parent company), and OpenAI over what they allege are open source licensing and IP violations.<\/p>\n I asked Zhao whether codebase owners will have a chance to opt out of training, now, in the event that they wish to do so. She said that there\u2019s no new mechanism for this with the broader launch of Copilot Chat and instead suggested that codebase owners make their repositories private to prevent them from being included in future training sets.<\/p>\n I have to imagine codebase owners won\u2019t take too kindly to that suggestion \u2014 there\u2019s many reasons for keeping copyrighted code public, least of which crowdsourcing bug hunting. But GitHub\u2019s evidently not willing to budge on training data opt-outs \u2014 or not yet, at least.<\/p>\n Generative AI models including GPT-4 also have a tendency to hallucinate, or confidently make up facts \u2014 which is particularly problematic in the coding realm. According to a recent Stanford study<\/a>, developers who use AI assistants to code tend to produce code that\u2019s less secure compared to those who don\u2019t use AI assistants, in part because the AI assistants introduce buggy or deprecated code snippets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Zhao said that GPT-4 performs \u201cbetter\u201d against hallucinations compared to the older model that once powered Copilot and pointed to exploit-mitigating features such as filters for insecure code patterns, which notify Copilot Chat users of vulnerabilities like hardcoded credentials, SQL injections and path injections. But she stressed the importance of close human review of any AI-suggested code.<\/p>\n \u201cGitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI\u2019s models, which we\u2019ve found to be the best models for the services we offer today,\u201d Zhao said. \u201cWe\u2019re in a really strong position to continue empowering developers with the AI tools they need to build better, more secure software at scale \u2014 and to have fun while they\u2019re doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts that Copilot had 1 million paying users and ~37,000 enterprise clients. But it\u2019s incumbent on GitHub to make Copilot even more attractive lest it lose ground to competitors \u2014 and, for that matter, lose cash.<\/p>\n According<\/a> to a Wall Street Journal piece, Copilot loses an average of $20 a month per user, with some customers costing GitHub as much as $80 a month. The high price of running the underlying AI models is reportedly to blame \u2014 a problem gen AI coding startup Kite<\/a> ran into, also, forcing it to shut down early last December.<\/p>\n As GitHub struggles to make Copilot profitable, Amazon continues upgrading CodeWhisperer, perhaps Copilot\u2019s best-resourced rival.<\/p>\n In April, Amazon made CodeWhisperer free of charge to developers without any usage restrictions. That month also saw the launch of CodeWhisperer Professional Tier, which added single sign-on with AWS Identity and Access Management integration as well as higher limits on scanning for security vulnerabilities. An enterprise plan for CodeWhisperer launched in September. And in early November, Amazon \u201coptimized\u201d CodeWhisperer to <\/span>provide<\/a> \u201cenhanced\u201d suggestions for app development on MongoDB, the open source database management program.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Aside from CodeWhisperer, Copilot has competition in startups like Magic<\/a>, Tabnine<\/a>, Codegen<\/a> and Laredo<\/a> as well as open source models like Meta\u2019s Code Llama<\/a> and Hugging Face\u2019s and ServiceNow\u2019s StarCoder<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n