GitHub brings AI-powered Copilot X coding assistant for developers

Microsoft-owned GitHub, a code-hosting platform, on Thursday, announced a new project called CoPilot X, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool to help developers write code faster. The company said that it is integrating AI research firm OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to bring chat and voice support to the new project.

The project, according to the company, is an extension of GitHub Pilot, which officially launched in June 2022 (in collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI) and already uses AI to help developers generate lines of code for their projects. GitHub was launched in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion. 

Thomas Dohmke, the chief executive officer of GitHub, wrote in a blog post, “We are bringing a chat interface to the editor that’s focused on developer scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio.”  

“This does far more than suggest code,” explained Dohmke, stating that GitHub Copilot Chat recognises what code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown and it’s deeply embedded into the integrated development environment (IDE), ready to accept commands. According to him, “A developer can get in-depth analysis and explanations of what code blocks are intended to do, generate unit tests, and even get proposed fixes to bugs.” 

GitHub also said in a statement that the AI-powered tool, built using OpenAI’s Codex model, currently writes 46% of the code on the platform and has helped developers code up to 55% faster. By auto-completing comments and code, Copilot serves as an AI pair programmer that keeps developers focused and productive. 

That said, the upgraded Copilot will now be used beyond mere code completion. By incorporating chat and voice features, developers can communicate with Copilot more naturally. As Dohmke mentioned "The new level of productivity will allow developers to concentrate on the bigger picture, fostering innovation and accelerating human progress." 

Additionally, Copilot X will be integrated into pull requests, command lines and documentation, providing instant answers to questions about projects, according to the company. 

GitHub now has over 100 million users globally and 10 million in India alone. 

Notably, in November 2022, a class-action law­suit was filed in a US fed­eral court by a group of anonymous copyright owners chal­leng­ing the legal­ity of GitHub Copi­lot and the related OpenAI Codex. In January this year, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, stating that the claims in the lawsuit doesn’t hold up - the hearing for the dismissal of which will take place in May 2023.  

Further, in February this year, GitHub said that its AI-based coding assistant is available for businesses at a monthly cost of $19 per user, after a short beta phase that started in December 2022. The Copilot for Business adds features like license management, organisation-wide policy management and additional privacy features.