It can become a massive (and unfair) competitive advantage.
Furthermore, Copilot will not work with less popular languages and also prevent popular languages from evolving.
I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting
BigQuery used to have a dataset updated weekly, looks like it hasn't been updated since about a year after the acquisition by Microsoft.
[EDIT] actually, I suspect their play here will be to open up the public data but own the best and most low-friction implementation, then add terms that let them also feed their algo with proprietary code built using their editors. That part won't be freely available, and no free version will be able to provide that further-improved model, even assuming all the software to build it is open-source. Assuming using this thing ends up being a significant advantage (so, assuming this matters at all) your choice will be to either hamstring yourself in the market or to help Microsoft build their dataset.
GitHub repositories are open for the taking, GPT-XXX is cloneable (mostly, anyway) and VS Code is extensible.
They definitely have a good head-start, but I really don't think there's anything here that won't be generally available within 2 years.
I can think of no one but a handful of companies being able to compete there. And they won't be ok with extending a Microsoft IDE, nor breaking GitHub TOS.
When you start competing on R&D costs the game changes.
There's always the chance that training costs will significantly decrease. But even at an order of magnitude less (ie. tens of Ks) it's still beyond reach for open projects and indie devs
I took a look at their examples and they are not at all compelling. In one example it generated SQL and somehow knew the columns and tables in a database that it had no context on. So that's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on right there.
Do many developers actually want to work in this manner? That is, being interrupted every time they type with a robot interjection of some Frankenstein code that they now have to go through and review and understand. Personally, this is going to kick me out of the zone/flow too often to be useful. Coding isn't the hard part of my job. If this tool can somehow guess the business requirements of the task at hand, then I'll be impressed.
Even if the tool generates accurate code, if I don't fully understand what it wrote, then what? I'm still stuck digging through documentation and stackoverflow to verify that whatever is in my text editor is correct code. "Code confidently in unfamiliar territory" sounds like a Boeing 737 Max sized disaster in the making.