Microsoft-owned GitHub is launching Copilot for Business, an at-scale AI developer tool that is now available for developers, teams, organizations and enterprises, along with a more advanced OpenAI model and new capabilities.
According to the company, the new capabilities include a more powerful AI model and algorithm to improve the quality of code suggestions, AI-based security vulnerability filtering, VPN proxy support and simple sign-up that allows any organization to quickly purchase Copilot for Business licenses online and assign seats. The announcement comes as Microsoft continues to integrate OpenAI’s models throughout its products, including a new conversational Bing search engine.
The new business-oriented GitHub Copilot comes as the company updates the underlying Codex model to a new OpenAI model, resulting in large scale improvements to the quality of code suggestions, as well as a reduction in time to give those suggestions to users.
In addition, GitHub improved Copilot by a new paradigm called Fill-In-the-Middle (FIM), which gives developers better craft prompts for code suggestions. Instead of only considering the prefix of the code, it also leverages known code suffixes and leaves a gap in the middle for Copilot to fill, the company says in the blog.
“This way, it now has more context about your intended code and how it should align with the rest of your program,” the company says. “FIM in GitHub Copilot consistently produces higher quality code suggestions, and we’ve developed various strategies to deliver it without any added latency.”
GitHub says it also updated the Copilot extension for VS Code with a lightweight client-side model to improve overall acceptance rates for code suggestions, resulting in a 4.5% reduction in wanted code suggestions.
The new AI-based vulnerability filtering system blocks insecure coding patterns in real time to make GitHub Copilot suggestions more secure, the company adds. The system targets common vulnerable coding patterns, such as hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections.
Code creation was one of the early uses cases of OpenAI’s conversational AI model ChatGPT, and with new tools like GitHub Copilot for Business, AI should continue to play a big role in software development and programming going forward.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke writes in a blog that GitHub Copilot uses generative AI in an editor extension that suggests code in real-time.
“It works with code and natural language prompts to offer multiple suggestions that can quickly be accepted or rejected—and it learns alongside developers to adapt to individual coding styles and conventions,” Dohmke says. “With GitHub Copilot, developers can use the editor of their choice from Visual Studio to Neovim, VS Code, or JetBrains IDEs.”
According to a GitHub blog post, when GitHub Copilot for individuals launched in June 2022, more than 27% of developers’ code files on average were generated by the tool. Now, GitHub Copilot is behind an average of 46% of a developers’ code across all programming languages. In Java, that number jumps to 61%, per the blog.
Now, 90% of developers using GitHub Copuilot report completing tasks faster, and 73% are better able to stay in the flow and conserve mental energy, Dohmke writes, citing internal research.
“This rate of success has enormous potential for developers and companies alike—just imagine the benefits of putting GitHub Copilot in the hands of 100-, 1,000-, or even 10,000-person development teams,” the GitHub CEO writes.
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