GitHub launches Copilot Chat, an AI-powered programming assistant, now available to all users. Copilot Chat, previously only available to enterprise customers and some paid individual subscribers, is now included for free in GitHub’s Copilot subscription packages and for verified faculty, students, and maintainers of open source projects.
Based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, Copilot Chat allows developers to chat with AI in natural language to get programming help and guidance. For example, users can ask her to explain coding concepts, find vulnerabilities, or write unit tests. GitHub continues to face criticism over potential licensing and copyright violations with its use of public training data.
When asked if those with a codebase can opt out of training, GitHub suggested making their repositories private instead. However, there are several reasons to keep copyrighted code public, such as community bug-tracking. There are also concerns about artificial intelligence illusions, where models confidently produce false information. While GitHub reports that GPT-4 performs better in this area and Copilot Chat has exploit detection features, careful human review of any AI-generated code remains critical.
Microsoft-owned GitHub stresses the importance of Copilot’s evolution to keep users busy, given its high operating costs and competition from Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, Magic, Tabnine and open-source models. Amazon continues to aggressively upgrade CodeWhisperer with new features and subscription packages aimed at the needs of developers. In October, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts that Copilot had 1 million paid users and about 37,000 enterprise customers. But it’s up to GitHub to make Copilot even more attractive so it doesn’t lose ground to competitors, and lose revenue.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Copilot loses an average of $20 per month per user, with some customers costing GitHub as much as $80 per month. The main reason is the high price of running the underlying AI models, a problem that coding startup GenAI Kite also faced, forcing it to shut down early last December.
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