Researchers attempt an open source alternative to GitHub’s Copilot

In June, OpenAI teamed up with GitHub to launch Copilot, a service that provides suggestions for whole lines of code inside development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio. Powered by an AI model called Codex — which OpenAI later exposed through an API — Copilot can translate natural language into code across more than a dozen programming languages, interpreting commands in plain English and executing them.

Now, a community effort is underway to create an open source, freely available alternative to Copilot and OpenAI’s Codex model. Dubbed GPT Code Clippy, its contributors hope to create an AI pair programmer that allows researchers to study large AI models trained on code to better understand their abilities — and limitations.

Open source models