7 ms·

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE".

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE (for free). So this idea that they owe you something needs to be reassessed. CoPilot is easily worth it and I think this is fair. I actually welcome it because I was nervous it might be like 80.

andrewallbright 4y ago
I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.
- maccaw 4y ago
  Do you also think you should be compensated by OpenAI for all the blog posts you've written that went into GPT3's training?
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    For sure
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  perhaps they can reimburse them with free access to an IDE and perpetual hosting of their repos /snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse incentives to pop up in doing so...
- PoignardAzur 4y ago
  The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code. But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video. In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them". And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc. But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot. tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.
lampe3 4y ago
For me learning vim or at least all the vim code editing features was a bigger boost in productivity then using copilot. I use the vim extension for vscode which is great. In general learning the tools we already have I would say has for now a greater impact on productivity then Copilot.
candiddevmike 4y ago
That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.
- neysofu 4y ago
  Why should the money go the to code authors in the first place? All training data is available under permissive licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs fixing), I'd say this is fair play.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Unless something has changed, the training data also includes copyleft code, not just permissively licensed code
    - visarga 4y ago
      Regarding the training of the model - I don't think a copyright can restrict reading, and training is reading, not distributing any original data. About deploying the model - it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That can be done by hashing ngrams and a bloom filter. The vast majority of code generated by Codex is original anyway. By the way, Codex is good for many other tasks, like, parsing the fields of a receipt, or extracting the summary of an email, or generating baby names, it's an all purpose NLP tool. Just call it like a function. Code completion is just one thing it does. It talks pretty great English, can compose poems.
      - CryZe 4y ago
        > it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That's a setting now.
  - mtlynch 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 4y ago
copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent. (and the training data is a huge part of the value of an AI product)
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  You need to require rights for scraping publicly available resources? Damn, rip Google.
  - wyager 4y ago
    You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and selling it in a book, for example.
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just happens to be the same as code you've written, say, because we both had the same professor in school, or that it's the obvious solution to the problem. once you've written a few lines of code as part of a larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of your license?
      - Taywee 4y ago
        Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content. It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the case that it was actually copied. If you want to make a point about things that incidentally match making people who independently reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function of software patents, not copyright.
2fast4you 4y ago
> ...it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years... I wouldn't go that far. It's a pretty big help in repetitive/boiler plate code and it's pretty good at intelligently transforming data, but I've found it gets in the way more often than it helps for every other case.
- lampe3 4y ago
  Yes for me it was the same. Usually it got the boilerplate code kind of okay and then I had to tweak it manually anyway. I would also not go that far. Having good auto completion because of Typescript for me is the way way way bigger productivity gain.
- fpgaminer 4y ago
  Copilot has written RegEx's and SQL for me from a textual description; or sometimes just from context. That's worth every penny not to wade through RegEx again.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Maybe you are working with a different stack and problems :)
ploxiln 4y ago
I don't like the idea of CoPilot ... and I'm happy it's not free :) I'm enjoying reading some comments where people consider how much it's actually worth for their usage. Dollars brings some sober analysis. I'm sure the development and compute have a significant cost, and should be paid for.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". That's not how I would paraphrase most of the comments here. At least the ones I'm seeing are closer to: "it's really neat as far as free demos go, but ultimately is not that useful and not worth paying for." My current prediction is that this coming recession and the increasing cost of money is going to lead directly to a new AI winter. This almost goes without saying for the mountains of useless ML projects being churned out by DS teams in companies big and small. However, even for this very expensive well staffed projects, there's still a gap between amazing demo and game changing product that none of the recent AI projects have been able to close. After billions poured into these demos, in the past 10 years very little of daily life has been impacted by AI and in 10 more years even less will since companies will stop forcing useless AI projects on customers. As someone with a lot of experience in ML/DS, I would recommend everyone in this field start thinking about how to reimagine your resume for something else. There's going to be a massive contraction in this space once the cheap money starts flowing.
mrits 4y ago
mind blowing? I'd pay $10/month to disable it
duxup 4y ago
> But $10/mo is a steal. Isn't that up for us to decide? For work yeah sure I have no problem. But I've been using it at work and home and my hobbyist projects are hardly worth paying $10 a month to use it. So in that context it's pricey. That's not "entitlement" that's just the value of the product to me.
stagas 4y ago
I only use it a couple of times a week maybe to autocomplete some tedious repetitive elements, and perhaps when I'm too lazy to find a lib for a very well known function, like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Those it does well and it works. But 10$ a month is too much, I'd sign up for a usage-based plan, if there was one, so that I can pay only for the times I use it. But not for a fixed subscription where it sits most of the time.
qorrect 4y ago
Completely agree, $10 a month is a steal. I have loved using it, I've had several moments where I had to stop typing to lookup a formula for something, and a few seconds later it provides the correct formula. Gives me those warm fuzzy feelings emacs used to give me.
CryptoBanker 4y ago
They provide VSCode as a free IDE because if they didn't, someone else would have, and in turn received all of the data that comes along with it. Let's not pretend Microsoft created VSCode out of the kindness of its heart
feet 4y ago
Ah yes because they provide some things for free they must be entitled to use the code everyone else wrote to train their models and profit from

andrewallbright 4y ago

I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.

maccaw 4y ago
Do you also think you should be compensated by OpenAI for all the blog posts you've written that went into GPT3's training?
- mikkergp 4y ago
  For sure
jazzyjackson 4y ago
perhaps they can reimburse them with free access to an IDE and perpetual hosting of their repos /snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse incentives to pop up in doing so...
PoignardAzur 4y ago
The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code. But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video. In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them". And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc. But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot. tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.

lampe3 4y ago

For me learning vim or at least all the vim code editing features was a bigger boost in productivity then using copilot. I use the vim extension for vscode which is great. In general learning the tools we already have I would say has for now a greater impact on productivity then Copilot.

candiddevmike 4y ago

That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.

neysofu 4y ago
Why should the money go the to code authors in the first place? All training data is available under permissive licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs fixing), I'd say this is fair play.
- Macha 4y ago
  Unless something has changed, the training data also includes copyleft code, not just permissively licensed code
  - visarga 4y ago
    Regarding the training of the model - I don't think a copyright can restrict reading, and training is reading, not distributing any original data. About deploying the model - it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That can be done by hashing ngrams and a bloom filter. The vast majority of code generated by Codex is original anyway. By the way, Codex is good for many other tasks, like, parsing the fields of a receipt, or extracting the summary of an email, or generating baby names, it's an all purpose NLP tool. Just call it like a function. Code completion is just one thing it does. It talks pretty great English, can compose poems.
    - CryZe 4y ago
      > it just needs to filter out verbatim exact snippets so it only outputs original, unattributable code. That's a setting now.
- mtlynch 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

colechristensen 4y ago

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent. (and the training data is a huge part of the value of an AI product)

mccorrinall 4y ago
You need to require rights for scraping publicly available resources? Damn, rip Google.
- wyager 4y ago
  You need to acquire rights for copy/pasting my code and selling it in a book, for example.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    but what if I publish an algorithm in my book that just happens to be the same as code you've written, say, because we both had the same professor in school, or that it's the obvious solution to the problem. once you've written a few lines of code as part of a larger project, is the rest of the world prohibited from writing the same code unless they agree to the terms of your license?
    - Taywee 4y ago
      Copyright doesn't punish incidentally matching content. It's specifically right to copy or transform content. To make a case for copyright violation, you have to make the case that it was actually copied. If you want to make a point about things that incidentally match making people who independently reinvent the same thing, you're criticizing the function of software patents, not copyright.

2fast4you 4y ago

> ...it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years... I wouldn't go that far. It's a pretty big help in repetitive/boiler plate code and it's pretty good at intelligently transforming data, but I've found it gets in the way more often than it helps for every other case.

lampe3 4y ago
Yes for me it was the same. Usually it got the boilerplate code kind of okay and then I had to tweak it manually anyway. I would also not go that far. Having good auto completion because of Typescript for me is the way way way bigger productivity gain.
fpgaminer 4y ago
Copilot has written RegEx's and SQL for me from a textual description; or sometimes just from context. That's worth every penny not to wade through RegEx again.
tiborsaas 4y ago
Maybe you are working with a different stack and problems :)

ploxiln 4y ago

I don't like the idea of CoPilot ... and I'm happy it's not free :) I'm enjoying reading some comments where people consider how much it's actually worth for their usage. Dollars brings some sober analysis. I'm sure the development and compute have a significant cost, and should be paid for.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". That's not how I would paraphrase most of the comments here. At least the ones I'm seeing are closer to: "it's really neat as far as free demos go, but ultimately is not that useful and not worth paying for." My current prediction is that this coming recession and the increasing cost of money is going to lead directly to a new AI winter. This almost goes without saying for the mountains of useless ML projects being churned out by DS teams in companies big and small. However, even for this very expensive well staffed projects, there's still a gap between amazing demo and game changing product that none of the recent AI projects have been able to close. After billions poured into these demos, in the past 10 years very little of daily life has been impacted by AI and in 10 more years even less will since companies will stop forcing useless AI projects on customers. As someone with a lot of experience in ML/DS, I would recommend everyone in this field start thinking about how to reimagine your resume for something else. There's going to be a massive contraction in this space once the cheap money starts flowing.

mrits 4y ago

mind blowing? I'd pay $10/month to disable it

duxup 4y ago

> But $10/mo is a steal. Isn't that up for us to decide? For work yeah sure I have no problem. But I've been using it at work and home and my hobbyist projects are hardly worth paying $10 a month to use it. So in that context it's pricey. That's not "entitlement" that's just the value of the product to me.

stagas 4y ago

I only use it a couple of times a week maybe to autocomplete some tedious repetitive elements, and perhaps when I'm too lazy to find a lib for a very well known function, like converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Those it does well and it works. But 10$ a month is too much, I'd sign up for a usage-based plan, if there was one, so that I can pay only for the times I use it. But not for a fixed subscription where it sits most of the time.

qorrect 4y ago

Completely agree, $10 a month is a steal. I have loved using it, I've had several moments where I had to stop typing to lookup a formula for something, and a few seconds later it provides the correct formula. Gives me those warm fuzzy feelings emacs used to give me.

CryptoBanker 4y ago

They provide VSCode as a free IDE because if they didn't, someone else would have, and in turn received all of the data that comes along with it. Let's not pretend Microsoft created VSCode out of the kindness of its heart

feet 4y ago

Ah yes because they provide some things for free they must be entitled to use the code everyone else wrote to train their models and profit from