GitHub has announced the general availability of Copilot Chat, a programming-centric chatbot similar to ChatGPT. Initially available to organizations subscribed to Copilot for Business, it later became accessible to individual Copilot customers in beta. Copilot Chat is now available to all users and can be found in the sidebar of Microsoft’s IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio. The chatbot is powered by GPT-4, OpenAI’s generative AI model, and can provide real-time guidance to developers, such as explaining concepts or writing unit tests. However, GitHub and other vendors are facing class action lawsuits over alleged copyright and licensing violations. Codebase owners cannot opt out of training, but GitHub suggests making repositories private to prevent inclusion in future training sets. While generative AI models like GPT-4 can sometimes produce insecure code, Copilot Chat includes filters for insecure code patterns. GitHub aims to continue empowering developers with AI tools and compete with rivals like Amazon’s CodeWhisperer.
