I'd say it's more than 'just' an autocomplete system. Naive autocomplete, as implemented in Excel since forever ago (and I'm sure long before that, I'm just fa

I'd say it's more than 'just' an autocomplete system. Naive autocomplete, as implemented in Excel since forever ago (and I'm sure long before that, I'm just familiar with being annoyed by Excel suggesting wrong entries from its simple and over-eager autocomplete system), merely matches a sequence of characters - if I typed "aut" again in this paragraph it will suggest "autocomplete" because I recently typed it. Implementing it is the kind of task you give to a first-year programming student to practice string matching data structures, similar to a spell checker that merely checks that a string exists in a dictionary. There's a spectrum from 'just' autocomplete, to a syntax-aware system like VS Intellicode, to this, and eventually beyond this. As mobile predictive text is to a spell checker, so Github Copilot is to autocomplete. As mobile predictive text is to GPT3 [1], so Github Copilot is to...what next? GPT3 is not just a spell checker. [1] Also by OpenAI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379