How Microsoft is monetizing the GitHub code base

Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018, something many users are not aware of. After Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub there have been many controversies like blocking private repositories and access to GitHub pages in certain countries and of course, GitHub Copilot.

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is an artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. Currently available by subscription to individual developers, the tool was first announced by GitHub on 29 June 2021, and works best for users coding in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.

How does copilot work?

GitHub Copilot is powered by the OpenAI Codex, an artificial intelligence model created by OpenAI. The Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model, which uses deep learning to create text that resembles human speech, is improved and used in production as the OpenAI Codex.

Github copilot was trained on a selection of the English language, public GitHub repositories, including 59 gigabytes of Python code sourced from 54 million public GitHub repositories.