[mrh0057]

There is nothing intelligent about this. What they did is a context aware search and trying to claim that not what this is. If it was just used as a search engine and people weren’t using the results or following the license of the original source, then it would fine. There has been so much of a hype of machine learning people likely have a false impression of what it is.

[Ajedi32]

I've seen this claim that Copilot is "just a search engine" repeated in multiple places now. It's wrong; as anyone familiar with any of the GPT variants or other similar autoregressive language models can attest.

Copilot isn't a search engine any more than any other language model is. It can sometimes output data from the training set verbatim as most AI models do from time to time, but that is the exception not the rule.

Whether modern autoregressive language models can be called "inteligent" is debatable, but they're certainly far beyond what you'd get from a simple search engine.

[mrh0057]

First off I said it was a context aware search which it is. It uses past training data to predict what you would type next based on the context ie the code around it. It’s no more intelligent than alpha go. Intelligent AI is considered to be a general ai which no one is even close to building yet.

Since neural networks are pattern matching based on the training input it is a derivative work of the training set. It says it right in first thing that comes up in auto regressive language models use the training input plus context to predict what the next word would be.

Now here where the fun begins if they try this in court. If you claim it’s generating new work then who owns the copyright? You may not realize how big of a deal this is but there was a court case you can lookup where a monkey took a selfy and the person who camera the monkey used tried to claim copyright and lost.