Inside Github: Working With The Llms Behind Github Copilot

The GitHub Next research and development team at GitHub worked with OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) to develop GitHub Copilot. The team was excited and astonished by the emergent behavior of the model, which was powerful enough to lead to the creation of Copilot. In June 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3, an LLM that sparked interest in code generation. The GitHub Next team evaluated the model by giving it coding-like tasks and crowdsourced self-contained tasks to evaluate the model’s performance. The team found that GPT-3 was good enough to begin considering how a code generation tool might work.