Last June, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI launched Copilot, a service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Available as a downloadable extension, Copilot is powered by an AI model called Codex that’s trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. Copilot can also surface an approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g. “Say hello world”), drawing on its knowledge base and current context.

While Copilot was previously available in technical preview, it’ll become generally available starting sometime this summer, Microsoft announced at Build 2022. Copilot will also be available free for students as well as “verified” open source contributors. On the latter point, GitHub said it’ll share more at a later date. Read More