ALT Github co-pilot is an AI pair programmer that gets suggestions for whole lines or entire functions right inside your editor. Copilot will step in to make suggestions, much like the autocomplete feature in email applications like Gmail, but for code written in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and other programming languages. Copilot was built in collaboration with the artificial intelligence lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others and that Microsoft invested $1B in last year.

ALT The Codex was trained on 54 million public software repositories hosted on GitHub as of May 2020. For python language alone, 179 GB of unique python files under 1 MB size were included in the training dataset

ALT There is no way to find that the code, copilot is suggesting, is from its own intelligence or is an open source code from a licensed repository. Copilot is free for beta users but may not be forever free. Developers are considering this as an unethical massive “code laundering” of open source code to the corporates. Creators who wrote the code were not considered during the process and there is no way to incentivize them or other contributors. Due to GitHub’s terms of use, developers are helpless and practically have no legal way to challenge it.

ALT Leaked secrets - As reported by a SendGrid engineer, when he asked for API secrets, the Copilot showed the correct results successfully to him. This issue was also acknowledged by Github CEO. Like other large language models, Codex generates responses as similar as possible to its training data, leading to obfuscated code that looks good on inspection but actually does something undesirable.