GitHub Copilot and the Rise of AI Language Models in Programming Automation

If you are a software engineer, or count any of them among your circle of acquaintances, then you're probably already aware at some level of Copilot. Copilot is GitHub's new deep learning code completion tool. Autocomplete tools for programmers are nothing new, and Copilot is not even the first to make use of deep learning nor even the first to use a GPT transformer. After all, TabNine sprung out of a summer project by OpenAI alum Jacob Jackson and makes use of the GPT-2 general purpose transformer. Microsoft (which owns GitHub) has packaged their own IntelliSense code completion tool with programming products since at least 1996, and autocomplete and text correction has been an active area of research since the 1950s.