The new product is called GitHub Copilot. The tool uses source code uploaded to the GitHub code-sharing service, which Microsoft acquired in 2018. Open AI, an artificial intelligence research startup, participated in the implementation. Microsoft invested $1 billion in it in the summer of 2019.

Researchers at Microsoft and several other companies have been trying for decades to teach computers to write their own code. GitHub Copilot is a big step in that direction. The product relies on a large amount of code in many programming languages and Azure’s enormous computing power. Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, says GitHub Copilot can almost completely replace a programmer’s partner. The tool looks at existing code and comments on it, as well as the location of the cursor, and suggests adding one or more lines depending on the context. As the programmer accepts or rejects the suggestions, the model learns and becomes much more sophisticated and intelligent over time.

Friedman says the GitHub Copilot significantly speeds up programming. Hundreds of developers on GitHub, he says, have already appreciated the product’s capabilities and don’t shut it down all day long.

Experts point out that the main advantage of GitHub Copilot is that it saves the programmer from having to study piles of documentation, thereby saving precious hours. Copilot is reported to work best with JavaScript, Python and TypeScript at the moment. The tool will initially appear in Microsoft Visual Studio Code, a free open-source product, before the company plans to include it in a commercial version of Visual Studio.

Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman says the Codex model behind GitHub’s Copilot is a descendant of the powerful GPT-3 model, which the company’s experts have trained on many terabytes of publicly available code. Copilot, according to GitHub staff, has a number of security mechanisms built in, giving confidence that the product will generate high-quality code. Microsoft reportedly plans to release a version of the product in the future that companies can train to understand their own programming styles. For now, Microsoft offers a service that is only trained on code stored in publicly available repositories.

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