Anyone is interested in starting to work on an open source alternative? I have a few terabytes of GitHub repository archives, a bit of experience and an non-profit umbrella (goal is AI Safety).
I think he hopes his Copilot competitor will be used to increase the safety of future AI systems that do not much resemble Copilot in purpose or architecture. (I agree with Eliezer that it will probably decrease safety on net despite his good intentions.)
The Copilot or Google Collab are interesting as they allow to create wast datasets of developer's work sessions, incrementally, line-by-line editing and improving code. Exploiting such datasets have interesting potential. And currently that potential seems to be limited to Microsoft and Google.
It might be a good idea to have something in the open as well. But I agree, this has its disadvantages. Also chances of a small non-profit team coming close to Microsoft/Google's effort are near-zero. The amount of resources and time is incomparable.