The service is free for students and maintainers of popular open source projects
GitHub, a division of Microsoft , today launched Copilot, an artificial intelligence tool that helps developers recommend lines of code in code editors. GitHub originally launched Copilot in preview last year in partnership with OpenAI, and it is available to all developers today.
is priced at $10 per month or $100 per year, and GitHub Copilot can suggest the next line of code as developers enter code in integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Visual Studio Code, Neovim and JetBrains IDEs. Copilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms, as well as assist with template code and unit testing.
With more than 1.2 million developers signing up to use GitHub Copilot in preview over the past 12 months, it continues to be a free tool for proven students and maintainers of popular open source projects. GitHub says that nearly 40% of the code in files that enable the tool is now written by Copilot.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said: "Just like the rise of compilers and open source, we believe that AI-assisted programming will fundamentally change the nature of software development, giving developers a new tool that makes it easier and more code faster, making their lives happier."
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, a research company now led by former president of Y Combinator Sam Altman, which fueled the creation of GitHub Copilot. It is built on OpenAI Codex, a descendant of OpenAI's flagship GPT-3 language generation algorithm. However, GitHub Copilot has always been controversial. Just days after its preview release, some questioned the legality of Copilot training on public code posted on GitHub. In addition to copyright issues, one study found that approximately 40% of Copilot's output contained security vulnerabilities.
Microsoft is not the only company working on developing automated artificial intelligence tools to assist programming. Last year, DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google , revealed an artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode, which is designed to write computer programs "at a competitive level." AlphaCode was tested on Codeforces, a competitive programming platform, and achieved an "estimated ranking" that placed it within the top 54% of human programmers . These challenges are different from those faced by regular programmers, but they illustrate how artificial intelligence programming systems can assist programmers in the future.
Today, GitHub Pilot is open to all developers with a 60-day free trial. GitHub will make Pilot available to enterprises later this year.
