Can GitHub Copilot Crack a Facebook Coding Interview?

medium.com

15 pointsgiacaglia3 comments

"The fact that Copilot is trained on publicly available code, under a variety of licenses, has led to many discussions about its legal implications."

Now that is a fascinating thought: unless Copilot is open source under a GPL then it shouldn't even take GPL code into account in it's base of knowledge because doing so would be to incorporate copy-left code in a non-copyleft product. I realize the underlying GPL code isn't in Copilot, but Copilot doesn't work correctly/as advertised without it, which seems like the code is included.

I wonder if Copilot will have to be forced to select a license compatibility mode in the (near?) future.

Using text to train models is legally considered fair use. You can use copyrighted material, you just can't redistribute it. The output is considered the responsibility of the user of the software. It's up to the user to ensure code or other content they're using isn't licensed or copyrighted.

If Copilot can complete the interview, you are interviewing wrong. Plain simple.

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