GitHub Copilot for Business launches with OpenAI’s Codex
Powered by OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot for Business programmer extension is now available. It comes with an upgraded version of OpenAI Codex and a new real-time vulnerability filter that detects typical security flaws as you code in the editor.
Github, the Microsoft-owned code repository service, announced GitHub Copilot for Business back in November of 2022 as an extension of the existing Copilot for Individuals. “Individuals” is priced at $10 a month, and based on the number of assigned Copilot seats, the monthly membership cost for the “Business” version is $19 per user. Suggestions from Copilot’s code are powered by OpenAI Codex, which converts natural language into code. Copilot can also be used alongside different editors, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, VS Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs.
According to GitHub, Copilot now has an updated Codex model and new features. The new Codex approach should lead to a bigger proportion of code being created by Copilot, which Microsoft is delivering to developers through Azure OpenAI Services together with GPT-3.5 and DALL-E 2. Additionally, it has created a security vulnerability filter to enhance the security of Copilot’s coding recommendations and aid developers in quickly identifying unsafe coding practices.
Copilot’s acceptance rate is on the lower end, but it’s still increasing significantly. Last year, developers reported an average acceptance percentage of 27% in June, which rose to 30% in September, and 35% in December. Now, the average is 46% across all supported programming languages.
Along with adopting a newer Codex model, GitHub Copilot For Business also received the Fill-In-the-Middle (FIM) “paradigm,” which improves upon the previous approach of simply taking the code prefix into account for known code suffixes, leaving a space for Copilot to fill in.
“This way, it now has more context about your intended code and how it should align with the rest of your program,” said Shuyin Zhao, senior director of product management at GitHub. “FIM in GitHub Copilot consistently produces higher quality code suggestions, and we’ve developed various strategies to deliver it without any added latency.”