It was only a matter of time that all the code from Github would be paired with OpenAI: https://copilot.github.com

Anyone here have preview access yet? This looks fascinating!

I thought this is cool too, and then I saw this tweet. (linked from HN) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 It's probably based on GPT-3, which means this will provide a most "popular" snippet, not necessarily a "correct" snippet. It is actually discovered that some of its codes use a questionable design (e.g. using a float for currency). I guess this is still usable for a boilerplate generator, but we shouldn't expect that much smartness in it. (which is a hard thing to do, because we tend to overestimate the ability of a black box.)

I just applied for preview access. But besides correctness, I'm curious what implications this has for software licensing. Is Copilot smart enough to detect the license that's in effect for wherever it's borrowing from?

I think it inevitably raised the good old "does AI have authorship?" question. This study suggests that it rarely verbatim copies the original code. https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation Then someone strongly objected to GitHub using copyrighted materials for its training. https://thelig.ht/abandoning-github/ The summary of this somewhat ongoing debate is found at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27725407