GitHub's Commercial AI Tool Was Built From Open Source Code

Earlier this month, Armin Ronacher, a prominent open-source developer, was experimenting with a new code-generating tool from GitHub called Copilot when it began to produce a curiously familiar stretch of code. The lines, drawn from the source code of the 1999 video game Quake III, are infamous among programmers--a combo of little tricks that add up to some pretty basic math, imprecisely. The original Quake coders knew they were hacking. "What the fuck," one commented in the code beside an especially egregious shortcut. So it was strange for Ronacher to see such code generated by Copilot, an artificial intelligence tool that is marketed to generate code that is both novel and efficient.