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Isn't it entirely possible that they did exclude GPL licensed code, but somebody somewhere has violated copyright and copy-pasted that snippet into non-GPL-lice
by throwaway287391 5y ago
Isn't it entirely possible that they did exclude GPL licensed code, but somebody somewhere has violated copyright and copy-pasted that snippet into non-GPL-licensed code that they trained on?
They could try to trace every single code snippet they train on to its "true source" and use the license for that, but that's not very well-defined, and is a lot harder, and it's never going to be 100%.
- ttt0 5y agoNope. They did include GPL code. > Once, GitHub Copilot suggested starting an empty file with something it had even seen more than a whopping 700,000 different times during training -- that was the GNU General Public License. https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation#github-copilot-quotes-when-it-lacks-specific-context https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...
- pessimizer 5y agoLooks like Copilot is smart enough to understand its own licensing situation. It should continue to suggest this for any empty file.
- another-dave 5y agoWhich raises another question: ideally Copilot wouldn't be trained on "somebody somwhere", but is that happening? To use the old trope — if the majority of programmers can't implement Fizzbuzz, but they do have a Github profile, are they being included too? Hopefully there's some quality bar for the training set, i.e. some subset of "good" code (e.g. release candidate tags from fairly established OSS tools/frameworks in different languages) rather than any old code on the internet.