New GPT-4o Copilot Model Unveiled for VS Code Users in Public Preview

GitHub announced that a new code completion model, GPT-4o Copilot, is now available in public preview for Visual Studio Code users. Based on GPT-4o mini, the model has been trained on more than 2,75,000 high-quality public repositories across over 30 programming languages.

“Our new code completion model is shipping in public preview today. We are calling it GPT-4o Copilot. Based on GPT-4o mini, with mid-training on a code-focused corpus exceeding 1T tokens and reinforcement learning with execution feedback (RLEF),” said GitHub chief Thomas Dohmke. He added that the company used real-life coding workflows and fine-tuned the model across 32 major programming languages.

According to GitHub, this update improves the accuracy of suggestions and enhances performance. Users can enable the model by opening the Copilot menu in the VS Code title bar and selecting ‘Configure Code Completions... > Change Completions Model…’ or by using the Command Palette and selecting ‘GitHub Copilot: Change Completions Model…’.

For Copilot Business and Enterprise users, an administrator must enable the model by opting for Editor preview features in the Copilot policy settings on GitHub. Free-tier users can access the model within their monthly limit of 2,000 completions. The model will soon be available for Copilot users in all JetBrains IDEs. 

GitHub has also updated Issues and Projects, introducing a streamlined issue creation flow, checklist-to-sub-issue conversion, and required fields for private repositories.

Previously, typing an issue title in a project defaulted to creating a draft issue. Based on user feedback, GitHub has changed this so that pressing ‘Enter’ now creates a new issue directly, while ‘Cmd / Ctrl + Enter’ creates a draft. “This change reflects how users typically engage with issue creation in projects,” GitHub stated.

Additional updates include improvements to tasklist blocks and single-issue templates. These changes aim to improve workflow efficiency for developers managing projects on GitHub.

Last year, GitHub announced that its AI-powered coding tool, GitHub Copilot, was now available for free within Visual Studio Code (VS Code). This announcement came as GitHub reached 150 million developers on its platform.