OpenAI’s GPT-4 has been taking the world by storm ever since release, and Microsoft is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI think tank’s research. After integrating GPT-4 into Bing Chat and Office, Microsoft has now added GPT-4 capabilities to GitHub.

As part of R&D efforts at GitHub Next, the company has unveiled ‘Copilot X’, an upgraded version of Copilot, its AI code assistant. In addition to this, the website is also getting a few upgrades, including changes to the pull request system. 

What is Copilot X?

GitHub Copilot is the latest Microsoft product to get the GPT-4 treatment. One of the biggest talking points of the new update is a ChatGPT-like experience right in the VS Code IDE. 

This doesn’t just suggest code but also helps get an in-depth analysis on the codes. The LLM even proposes bug fixes and recognises the code typed by the developer. GitHub is also working on a voice-to-code model that can take verbal natural language instructions and turn them into code. 

GitHub pull requests are one of the most basic tools for team-based development but they decided to reinvent the wheel. Adding on AI to pull requests, developers now have an option to auto-fill AI-generated descriptions for pull requests on the site. This goes hand in hand with the documentation improvements included in this update as well. 

Termed ‘Copilot for docs’, GitHub has added a chat interface that can answer users’ queries about documentation. Currently rolling out for documentation of Microsoft products such as React, Azure Docs, and MDN, developers can also join the waitlist to enroll their own documentation in this service. 

Apart from the IDE and the GitHub page itself, the command line interface is one of the most common programming environments for developers. Copilot X brings code generation capabilities to this environment as well, allowing devs to give natural language prompts for complex applications such as ‘find flags and loops’.

Combined with Microsoft’s push to integrate AI into their product suite, they have created something known as the Microsoft knowledge model. This approach brings together LLMs and Microsoft 365 applications, taking data from all the products to create a seamless work experience across the suite. 

For example, ‘Business Chat’ pulls in data from Teams, Excel, Graph, Word documents and more to answer queries. It does so by calling on the knowledge model, which is trained on all of a company’s data. This shows that Copilot isn’t just for GitHub anymore—it’s Microsoft’s new strategy. 

Juiced up with AI

Microsoft has been on a GPT-4 integration spree ever since their $10 billion investment into OpenAI. In fact, GitHub Copilot was one of the first products to come out of this partnership as it was built on OpenAI’s Codex LLM. Microsoft Designer also leverages DALL-E to create images based on users’ prompts. 

Following this, the tech giant unveiled Bing Chat, which brought together the power of Bing’s search and indexing with GPT-4. Apart from this, Microsoft has also integrated GPT-4 into the Office through a product known as ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot’. Bringing the Copilot branding to Word, Excel, Powerpoint and more, Microsoft is putting cutting-edge algorithms in the hands of consumers all over the world.

Even as this new crop of consumer-focused AI integrations have come into the picture, Microsoft’s enterprise division has been benefitting from the partnership as well. From launching the Azure supercomputing cluster for AI tasks to the Azure OpenAI service, the cloud computing giant has gained considerably from the OpenAI partnership as well. 

Just yesterday, they also announced the launch of the GPT-4 service on Azure. With this product, they now offer all of OpenAI’s cutting edge models on the cloud service provider, including DALLE, GPT 3.5, and ChatGPT. Interestingly, this is also the last place where the Codex API is available after being discontinued on OpenAI’s platform earlier this week. 

With the integration of GPT-4 into GitHub Copilot, Microsoft has come full circle, bringing the latest generation of AI back to one of their first generative AI products. While GitHub Copilot has become one of the most popular products for developers, the addition of GPT-4 to both Copilot and the rest of GitHub is sure to usher in an era of AI-human pair programmers.