To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE".
Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get.
And no. They don't owe you anything.
In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE (for free). So this idea that they owe you something needs to be reassessed.
CoPilot is easily worth it and I think this is fair. I actually welcome it because I was nervous it might be like 80.
I wouldn't go that far. It's a pretty big help in repetitive/boiler plate code and it's pretty good at intelligently transforming data, but I've found it gets in the way more often than it helps for every other case.
I would also not go that far.
Having good auto completion because of Typescript for me is the way way way bigger productivity gain.
Copilot isn't honoring the license, so why does it matter whether it was under a restrictive or permissive license?
Isn't that up for us to decide?
For work yeah sure I have no problem.
But I've been using it at work and home and my hobbyist projects are hardly worth paying $10 a month to use it. So in that context it's pricey. That's not "entitlement" that's just the value of the product to me.
That's not how I would paraphrase most of the comments here. At least the ones I'm seeing are closer to: "it's really neat as far as free demos go, but ultimately is not that useful and not worth paying for."
My current prediction is that this coming recession and the increasing cost of money is going to lead directly to a new AI winter. This almost goes without saying for the mountains of useless ML projects being churned out by DS teams in companies big and small. However, even for this very expensive well staffed projects, there's still a gap between amazing demo and game changing product that none of the recent AI projects have been able to close. After billions poured into these demos, in the past 10 years very little of daily life has been impacted by AI and in 10 more years even less will since companies will stop forcing useless AI projects on customers.
As someone with a lot of experience in ML/DS, I would recommend everyone in this field start thinking about how to reimagine your resume for something else. There's going to be a massive contraction in this space once the cheap money starts flowing.
Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address this kind of code use without license, attribution, or consent. (and the training data is a huge part of the value of an AI product)
I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff, housing, etc.)
It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair manner.
The consent issue is a difficult legal aspect as well. Github's ToS Section D.4 clearly states they retain the rights to process your content and
parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service
GPL and other licences don't place restriction on the usage as training data. It's currently a very murky legal grey area. Licences need to adapt to this new form of usage pattern.
I don't think it's really that murky, these models contain and have been shown to reproduce copyrighted code with the right prompting, it's not a grey area it's just obfuscated theft.
Damn, rip Google.
It was not published to be freely reproduced without adhering to licenses, etc.
You don't need to acquire rights to read a newspaper (other than say, paying a dollar), you do need rights to copy articles and sell them.
I'm enjoying reading some comments where people consider how much it's actually worth for their usage. Dollars brings some sober analysis. I'm sure the development and compute have a significant cost, and should be paid for.
I have loved using it, I've had several moments where I had to stop typing to lookup a formula for something, and a few seconds later it provides the correct formula. Gives me those warm fuzzy feelings emacs used to give me.
/snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse incentives to pop up in doing so...
Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code.
But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video.
In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them".
And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc.
But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot.
tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.
I use the vim extension for vscode which is great.
In general learning the tools we already have I would say has for now a greater impact on productivity then Copilot.