GitHub has released the final version of its chat copilot to the public

In early 2023, GitHub launched Copilot Chat to organizations with a paid subscription. Some time ago, the beta version of GitHub Chat Copilot was made available to non-organizational premium users. Now GitHub has released the final version of this chatbot for developers to the public.

According to TechCrunch, Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar of Microsoft IDE and Visual Studio. Of course, this chatbot is only active for paid subscribers and only teachers, students and some other people can use it for free.

The final version of Copilot Chat

Copilot Chat supports GPT-4, the OpenAI generative artificial intelligence model; Of course, this model has been developed specifically for programming applications. Developers can chat with Copilot and ask for help. This chatbot can instantly explain specific programming concepts and troubleshoot and test codes.

Like all generative AI models, the model underlying Chat Copilot, GPT-4, is trained on extensive data, some of which is copyrighted. For this reason, some coders are suing Microsoft, GitHub's parent company, and OpenAI for intellectual property infringement.

With Copilot Chat now publicly available, GitHub is asking owners of copyrighted code to make their resources private so that they are not used to train an AI model. But it seems that the owners of these codes will not welcome this proposal, because there are many reasons to keep copyrighted codes public, one of which is the troubleshooting of the codes by other coders. But apparently GitHub doesn't want to give up this training data.

Also, generative artificial intelligence models, including GPT-4, are not very reliable in providing codes and sometimes they think the codes are correct with false confidence; Such a problem is very problematic in the field of coding. According to a recent Stanford study, developers who use AI assistants to code produce less secure code than those who do not use AI.