Tuesday, 27 February 2024, Bengaluru, India
Today, GitHub announced the general release of Copilot Enterprise, the $39 a month version of their developer-focused chatbot and code completion solution for larger enterprises. All of the features of the current Business plan are included in Copilot Enterprise, including IP indemnification, but it also adds some essential capabilities for larger teams. The standout feature here is the ability to refer to an organization’s internal knowledge base and code. Additionally, Copilot has been integrated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine (which is still in development), and soon, users will be able to adjust Copilot’s models using the team’s current codebase.
(Image Source: https://github.blog/)
With that, new team developers can ask Copilot, for example, how to launch a container image to the cloud and receive a response tailored to their company’s procedures. After all, for many developers, being productive when switching firms is more about understanding the various processes than it is about understanding the codebase; however, Copilot may undoubtedly aid in understanding the code as well.
Since many teams already save their documentation in GitHub repositories, Copilot can easily reason over it. In fact, according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, since the company recently granted all of its staff access to these new features and stores almost all of its internal documents on the platform, some users have begun using it for non-engineering inquiries as well. For instance, they have started asking Copilot about vacation policies.
Dohmke mentioned that the Bing integration would help inquire with Copilot about things that might have changed since the model was first trained (such as open-source libraries or APIs). As of right now, this feature is exclusive to the Enterprise edition. Dohmke would not comment on whether or not it would be added to the other versions, but I wouldn’t be shocked if GitHub eventually added this feature to the different tiers as well.
Fine-tuning, which launches soon, is one feature that will probably stay a corporate feature due in part to its related expense. Dohmke clarified, “We allow companies to select a subset of repositories within their GitHub organization and then fine-tune the model on those repositories.” But he also pointed out that this implies the model can only be as current if embeddings, talents, and agents (like the new Bing agent) were used. However, he contends that everything is complementary and that users currently trying this functionality report notable gains. This is particularly true for teams working with internal libraries only available in an enterprise or with codebases in less popular languages like Python and JavaScript.
In addition to discussing the release today, I questioned Dohmke about his overarching plans for Copilot’s future. In essence, the response is “more Copilot in more places.” Over the next year, a greater emphasis will be placed on the end-to-end process of integrating Copilots, where you now perform your work, rather than developing a separate location where you can copy and paste content. That, in my opinion, is the main reason why the GitHub team is so thrilled about the chance to offer Copilot on GitHub.com—where engineers already collaborate and create most of the world’s software.
Regarding the underlying technology and its future direction, Dohmke noted that GPT 3.5 Turbo is now the platform on which the auto-completion feature operates. GitHub never transferred that model to GPT 4 because of its latency restrictions. Still, Dohmke also mentioned the team had revised the model “more than half a dozen times” since Copilot Business launched.
It appears that GitHub will only differentiate its pricing levels based on the scale of the models that drive those experiences, as Google has done. “Different models are needed for different use cases. For each model version, many optimizations—latency, accuracy, outcome quality, and responsible AI—play a significant part in ensuring that the output is secure, ethical, and compliant and does not produce code of a lesser caliber than our clients require. According to Dohmke, we’ll keep employing the most incredible models available for each component of the Copilot experience.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
