3 ms·

> It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible How is that obvious? I am relatively certain that MS com

> It's pretty obvious that without the open source code corpus, such tool would not have been possible How is that obvious? I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire code base as training material would do the trick, if that's what it took. Or, additionally, maybe licensing some other huge high quality code bases (restricted to just training the ai) for a few million bucks? It's not like it would be an issue to find vendors happy to remonetize their already written code. Given what's at stake here and who sits at the helm, I don't see how Copilot would not or could not be moved forwards regardless.

abirch 4y ago
To be honest, I wish that better code repositories we're given more weight. Microsoft's should be given more weight, especially considering the security issues that is autosuggested by copilot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293 https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293
californical 4y ago
If that would’ve worked, then they should’ve done that instead though! Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for themselves (and their users)? I would feel much more comfortable with the idea of using copilot if I was sure that I wouldn’t generate copyright infringing code, which Microsoft could guarantee if they had licensed the training data. There would be huge benefits to going that route, but they didn’t. That’s what makes me think that it’s impossible because they needed a huge volume of data, and the only way to get enough was to take it without consent of the license owners.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for themselves (and their users)? Simple: They disagree with you on the risk of that happening and the potential cost if it did.
  - lta 4y ago
    I wish they were as careful of other's people's code IP as they're with their own. If this is not derivative work, how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones ? Either their codebase is low quality, either they think it would leak their IP, meaning it's derivative work. Neither solution sounds great for them
    - jstummbillig 4y ago
      > how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones? Convenience probably. Using their own code would have required them to coordinate inhouse, and carefully and expensively sanitise everything, because committing their code, which was largely never written to be open sourced, to run the wild Copilot experiment (which it still is at this point) probably seemed a little riskier than they liked, potentially creating some kind of security disaster. So just use the stuff that is already in the open and thus better be secure enough as is, at what they apparently deem the relatively small risk and costs of lawsuits happening. I could also see them wanting to test the water on how the license thing flies.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      MS may well have something similar internally, they are just never going to expose it publicly. They get the best of both worlds.
athrowaway3z 4y ago
> I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire code base as training material would do the trick, if that's what it took I am more than relatively certain that it would provide far worse quality, if not be unusable by developers on average.
rmbyrro 4y ago
That's absurd. One company, even the size of Microsoft, cannot possibly cover all nuances, programming languages, patterns, architectures that the entire OSS is providing.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Nor do they have to. The goal of Copilot is not to simulate the maximum number of OSS contributors and idiosyncrasies.

abirch 4y ago

To be honest, I wish that better code repositories we're given more weight. Microsoft's should be given more weight, especially considering the security issues that is autosuggested by copilot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293 https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09293

californical 4y ago

If that would’ve worked, then they should’ve done that instead though! Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for themselves (and their users)? I would feel much more comfortable with the idea of using copilot if I was sure that I wouldn’t generate copyright infringing code, which Microsoft could guarantee if they had licensed the training data. There would be huge benefits to going that route, but they didn’t. That’s what makes me think that it’s impossible because they needed a huge volume of data, and the only way to get enough was to take it without consent of the license owners.

jstummbillig 4y ago
> Why create such huge possibility for legal battles for themselves (and their users)? Simple: They disagree with you on the risk of that happening and the potential cost if it did.
- lta 4y ago
  I wish they were as careful of other's people's code IP as they're with their own. If this is not derivative work, how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones ? Either their codebase is low quality, either they think it would leak their IP, meaning it's derivative work. Neither solution sounds great for them
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    > how come they didn't use their own codebase instead of taking the opensource ones? Convenience probably. Using their own code would have required them to coordinate inhouse, and carefully and expensively sanitise everything, because committing their code, which was largely never written to be open sourced, to run the wild Copilot experiment (which it still is at this point) probably seemed a little riskier than they liked, potentially creating some kind of security disaster. So just use the stuff that is already in the open and thus better be secure enough as is, at what they apparently deem the relatively small risk and costs of lawsuits happening. I could also see them wanting to test the water on how the license thing flies.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    MS may well have something similar internally, they are just never going to expose it publicly. They get the best of both worlds.

athrowaway3z 4y ago

> I am relatively certain that MS committing their entire code base as training material would do the trick, if that's what it took I am more than relatively certain that it would provide far worse quality, if not be unusable by developers on average.

rmbyrro 4y ago

That's absurd. One company, even the size of Microsoft, cannot possibly cover all nuances, programming languages, patterns, architectures that the entire OSS is providing.

jstummbillig 4y ago
Nor do they have to. The goal of Copilot is not to simulate the maximum number of OSS contributors and idiosyncrasies.