I tried GitHub Copilot
I need to start off by saying that I received the product for free…through work. I wasn’t required to use it or anything, but we are working on AI solutions, so it’s good to see what is out there. I’ll be honest, my expectations were pretty low. When all the recent AI craze started taking off, I was skeptical at best. But I’ll also admit I was being naive. I didn’t really understand the technology yet. I was judging a book by its cover. Shame on me. I’m not going to say that I’ve become an expert since that moment, but I at least have a better understanding of what large language models are offering.
Language is complicated, but our most important invention. It’s evolved over tens of thousands of years and multiple species of humans. We have dead languages like Latin, Sumerian, and Ancient Greek that are no longer spoken. They’ve been immensely important stepping stones, and were spoken by nations of power throughout history. As of today, there are over 7000 spoken languages, but only about 4000 of them have writing systems. That is still an incredible amount given there are less than 200 countries. Most people speak at least 2 languages, unless you are in the US. Some speak upwards of 7 or more. While most large language models have only been trained on some of the more dominant languages, for it to generate language that is legible and coherent is no small feat.
None of those numbers include all of the programming languages that exist, and this blog post is mostly about GitHub Copilot, which helps write code, not just natural language. As we’ve talked about before, code can be a universal language, which adds a whole other layer of complexity.