5 ms·

Copilot is useless compared to chat-gpt4. There's really no comparison. As far as the costs, it seems like transmitting things repeatedly would be more expens

Copilot is useless compared to chat-gpt4. There's really no comparison. As far as the costs, it seems like transmitting things repeatedly would be more expensive than the chat model where you just transmit things when you want them.

tedivm 3y ago
Copilot is chat gpt4, and has been since roughly April. It's built on top of it.
- simonw 3y ago
  It's not GPT-4, it's gpt-3.5-turbo (or a variant there-of). Source: I'm sitting in the audience of a talk about it at AI Engineering summit right now, the speaker confirmed it as gpt-3.5-turbo, switched from Codex.
- tmikaeld 3y ago
  To be fair, before they switched to GPT-4 it was pretty bad..
  - onionisafruit 3y ago
    Interesting that you say that. I had the opposite thought that it doesn’t seem to have improved much over time, but I think my perception might be influenced by my habit of ignoring large suggestions and only looking at the results when it fills the rest of the line I was typing. I’m also using it with intellij instead of vscode, so for all I know I could be using an old version still.
- TheRoque 3y ago
  Wow, I didn't know there, I must have missed the news. I swear I have seen everywhere that it was using this "Codex" model
  - onionisafruit 3y ago
    I think codex is what early versions of copilot used.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  The underlying model might be as good, but how you interface with it seems to deliver wildly different results. I can easily get chat-gpt to give me entire blocks of code. Copilot just trickles out small bits. Copilot is also very distracting because I find myself constantly waiting to see if what it's going to do next is helpful or not, whereas just typing into chat gpt I know I'm going to get something in the direction of what I want.
  - dist-epoch 3y ago
    VS Code now has a Copilot Chat panel where you can have large conversations.
  - kuhzaam 3y ago
    For me it is very different use cases. Copilot often prevents me from needing to write mundane blocks of code, as it will often fill in what I'm looking for after I write the function name. If I'm still unsure how I might approach a certain problem, or if it isn't immediately clear to me how I'd write the function I want, I might type in a prompt to ChatGPT and see what it comes up with. But it would really slow down my workflow if I had to prompt ChatGPT for every mundane function I plan to write.
- bhouston 3y ago
  I suspect the cost problem arose specifically upgrading to ChatGPT 4 over ChatGPT 3 - right there their costs increased more than 5x. So before it was likely under $5/month on average, but once you changed to ChatGPT 4, it jumped to like $20/month on average.
- volkk 3y ago
  Is that actually true? I remember Copilot-X being containing the GPT4 version and I'm pretty sure that wasn't out back in April. I don't even think it was out this summer
  - siva7 3y ago
    X also isn't GPT-4 but the previous cheaper model
- ruffrey 3y ago
  It’s built on it, and pretrained on most of the open source code on GitHub.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I don't see how this can be true. It generates code so much faster than GPT-4 does when you call it through chatgpt.
- siva7 3y ago
  It's not. Copilot is based on GPT-3
- aryadee 3y ago
  For code completion, it uses an improved version of Codex[1], and for chat beta (part of Copilot X), it uses 3.5-turbo[2]. [1]: https://github.blog/2023-07-28-smarter-more-efficient-coding-github-copilot-goes-beyond-codex-with-improved-ai-model/ https://github.blog/2023-07-28-smarter-more-efficient-coding... [2]: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56975#discussioncomment-6086471 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56975#discussi...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elil17 3y ago
Constant transmission is what makes it so useful, though
zarzavat 3y ago
I disagree. I have both but I use Copilot a lot more. Editing the results of ChatGPT takes as long as it would take for me to write the code myself. Whereas Copilot is autocomplete, you can choose whether to accept it or not line by line.
- prattcmp 3y ago
  Are you using ChatGPT 4 or 3.5? GPT 4 is phenomenal.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    How are you prompting ChatGPT such that you get useful results in a real world code base? It doesn’t have any context. The context is what makes Copilot work. By default, ChatGPT can only give a generic answer. Do you just paste the entire file in there? For example let’s say I want to write a function foo() that calls functions bar() and baz() defined in the same file and uses a library Y that I already imported. If I just write the name of the function, Copilot will often autocomplete a reasonable body for me. If I wanted to use ChatGPT then I would have to first tell it about foo() and bar() and the dependency on Y, and by the time I’ve finished telling it about all of that I could have written the function by hand twice over.

tedivm 3y ago

Copilot is chat gpt4, and has been since roughly April. It's built on top of it.

simonw 3y ago
It's not GPT-4, it's gpt-3.5-turbo (or a variant there-of). Source: I'm sitting in the audience of a talk about it at AI Engineering summit right now, the speaker confirmed it as gpt-3.5-turbo, switched from Codex.
tmikaeld 3y ago
To be fair, before they switched to GPT-4 it was pretty bad..
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  Interesting that you say that. I had the opposite thought that it doesn’t seem to have improved much over time, but I think my perception might be influenced by my habit of ignoring large suggestions and only looking at the results when it fills the rest of the line I was typing. I’m also using it with intellij instead of vscode, so for all I know I could be using an old version still.
TheRoque 3y ago
Wow, I didn't know there, I must have missed the news. I swear I have seen everywhere that it was using this "Codex" model
- onionisafruit 3y ago
  I think codex is what early versions of copilot used.
linuxftw 3y ago
The underlying model might be as good, but how you interface with it seems to deliver wildly different results. I can easily get chat-gpt to give me entire blocks of code. Copilot just trickles out small bits. Copilot is also very distracting because I find myself constantly waiting to see if what it's going to do next is helpful or not, whereas just typing into chat gpt I know I'm going to get something in the direction of what I want.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  VS Code now has a Copilot Chat panel where you can have large conversations.
- kuhzaam 3y ago
  For me it is very different use cases. Copilot often prevents me from needing to write mundane blocks of code, as it will often fill in what I'm looking for after I write the function name. If I'm still unsure how I might approach a certain problem, or if it isn't immediately clear to me how I'd write the function I want, I might type in a prompt to ChatGPT and see what it comes up with. But it would really slow down my workflow if I had to prompt ChatGPT for every mundane function I plan to write.
bhouston 3y ago
I suspect the cost problem arose specifically upgrading to ChatGPT 4 over ChatGPT 3 - right there their costs increased more than 5x. So before it was likely under $5/month on average, but once you changed to ChatGPT 4, it jumped to like $20/month on average.
volkk 3y ago
Is that actually true? I remember Copilot-X being containing the GPT4 version and I'm pretty sure that wasn't out back in April. I don't even think it was out this summer
- siva7 3y ago
  X also isn't GPT-4 but the previous cheaper model
ruffrey 3y ago
It’s built on it, and pretrained on most of the open source code on GitHub.
sebzim4500 3y ago
I don't see how this can be true. It generates code so much faster than GPT-4 does when you call it through chatgpt.
siva7 3y ago
It's not. Copilot is based on GPT-3
aryadee 3y ago
For code completion, it uses an improved version of Codex[1], and for chat beta (part of Copilot X), it uses 3.5-turbo[2]. [1]: https://github.blog/2023-07-28-smarter-more-efficient-coding-github-copilot-goes-beyond-codex-with-improved-ai-model/ https://github.blog/2023-07-28-smarter-more-efficient-coding... [2]: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56975#discussioncomment-6086471 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/56975#discussi...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

elil17 3y ago

Constant transmission is what makes it so useful, though

zarzavat 3y ago

I disagree. I have both but I use Copilot a lot more. Editing the results of ChatGPT takes as long as it would take for me to write the code myself. Whereas Copilot is autocomplete, you can choose whether to accept it or not line by line.

prattcmp 3y ago
Are you using ChatGPT 4 or 3.5? GPT 4 is phenomenal.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  How are you prompting ChatGPT such that you get useful results in a real world code base? It doesn’t have any context. The context is what makes Copilot work. By default, ChatGPT can only give a generic answer. Do you just paste the entire file in there? For example let’s say I want to write a function foo() that calls functions bar() and baz() defined in the same file and uses a library Y that I already imported. If I just write the name of the function, Copilot will often autocomplete a reasonable body for me. If I wanted to use ChatGPT then I would have to first tell it about foo() and bar() and the dependency on Y, and by the time I’ve finished telling it about all of that I could have written the function by hand twice over.