Github AI programming tool Copilot is officially launched, the era of "white prostitution" is over, 67 yuan/month!

After nearly a year of testing, Microsoft's GitHub artificial intelligence programming tool Copilot was finally officially launched yesterday.

GitHub Copilot: Helps developers write code faster

According to the official introduction, Copilot, GitHub's by-product AI coding aid, was released as early as June 2021 in a technology preview. It aims to help software developers write code in Visual Studio, Visual Studio code, Neovim and JetBrains IDE through automatic Offers suggestions to write code faster.

Programming languages supported by GitHub Copilot include Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Ruby, and Go. With GitHub Copilot, software developers can use inline comments in the editor to get code suggestions for programming languages like JavaScript, Python, TypeScript, and Ruby.

As long as the user gives a hint, GitHub Copilot can help developers automatically write complete functions according to the context, or implement complete functions, including docstrings, comments, function names, code. It also allows users to accept, reject, and manually edit these code suggestions.

It is reported that GitHub Copilot is a text generation technology based on OpenAI, and AI programming tools can be used as extensions of text editors and IDEs. It provides integration with popular applications such as Neovim, Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code and various JetBrains IDEs.

Earlier, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the research firm now led by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman, which created GitHub Copilot.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, said, "With over 1.2 million developers in our technology preview over the past 12 months, those who started using GitHub Copilot quickly told us that it had become an integral part of their daily workflow. GitHub Copilot uses popular coding languages such as Python, and we expect this percentage to increase.”

"Like the rise of compilers and open source software, we believe AI-assisted coding will fundamentally change the very nature of software development, giving developers a new tool to write code more easily and faster, It makes their lives happier.”

67 yuan/month? "Open source to pay" leads to controversy

Copilot has been officially available to all developers starting June 22, and supports a 60-day free trial. That said, if current users don't subscribe, they won't be able to use Copilot on August 22nd.

Software developers who are testing the GitHub Copilot extension will now be prompted to activate a 60-day free trial. The Github AI programming tool Copilot is priced at $10 per month or $100 per year, but is available for free to all verified student users and maintainers of popular open source projects.

It is important to note that Copilot is an automated tool and its code suggestions may not always be accurate.

Since GitHub Copilot is built on OpenAI Codex, it is a "descendant" of OpenAI's flagship GPT-3 language generation algorithm. However, GitHub Copilot has been controversial since its creation.

(Related Reading:
Copilot violates privacy, plagiarizes code, ignores licenses... This year's GitHub has changed? https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040282640

Free Software Foundation approves GitHub Copilot: "Unacceptable and unfair"
https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040452902 )

I still remember that when GitHub just launched the AI programming tool Copilot last year, it caused an uproar. Because Copilot's training data is publicly available, including terabytes of public code on GitHub. However, GitHub chose to turn the open source code contributed by developers into "paid products" and sell them to developers, which caused a lot of complaints from developers at the time.

Just days after the GitHub Copilot preview was released, questions were raised about the legality of Copilot being trained on public code posted to GitHub. Copyright issues aside, one study also found security holes in about 40% of Copilot's output.

However, GitHub also recommends that developers test their code for issues such as bugs, unsupported API references, and security vulnerabilities that GitHub Copilot may contain. At the same time, GitHub also plans to add support for enterprise management of user accounts later this year.

Microsoft is not the only company working on developing automated artificial intelligence tools to help with coding.

As early as last year, Google's DeepMind released an artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode, which was designed to write computer programs at a "competitive level". AlphaCode was tested with Codeforces as a competitive The coding platform, Codeforces has achieved an "evaluation ranking" and has successfully ranked among the top 54% of human coders. Of course, like the GitHub Copilot launched this time, their appearance fully demonstrates how artificial intelligence coding systems can help programmers in the future.

Reference link: https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/21/23176574/github-copilot-launch-pricing-release-date
https://petri.com/github-copilot-ai-coding-assistant-subscription-fee/