Either way, you’re sending your companys biggest asset to another company, aren’t you? I’ll try these tools when they start being able to run locally
Do you have more details? Please elaborate.
Obviously, add it to the big training set of the next code model.
Likely, some employee would whistleblow that they're not complying with their privacy policy, and either government litigation or a class action lawsuit would ensue. That legal process would involve subpoenas and third-party auditors being granted access to GitHub/Microsoft's internal code and communications history, which makes it pretty hard to hide something as big as collecting, storing, and then training from a huge amount of uploaded code snippets they promised not to.
It's not inconceivable that they're noncompliant, but my bet would be that if they are collecting data they explicitly promise not to it's an accidental or malicious action by an individual employee, and they will freak out when they discover it and delete everything as soon as they can. If they intended to collect that data, it would be much easier to write that into the policy than deal with all the risk.
Notably, this applies to Copilot for Business, which is presumably what you're using if you are at work.
Not sure that this is how the model works, but it is conceivable.
If you are building something truly valuable locally, and it is innovative or otherwise disruptive and relies on being a first mover, centrally hosted LLMs are a non-starter.
Most software corps have countless millions of lines of code. You'd be spending lifetimes tracing where someone ripped your "copyrighted" techniques and methods.
The complete lack of security awareness and willingness to compromise privacy for convenience in people deeply saddens me.
I have to ask: do you carry a cellphone?
The cellphone is not a compromise for convenience. It allows me to make a living, providing internet connectivity and lets me keep in contact with friends and family. Without it, my freedoms would be drastically diminished.
With software we develop with, we have choices. We can use OSS. We can try to use open hardware. If we are working on sensitive things, we can use an airgapped system with vim.
When you practice these kinds of routines, they are not a burden. Actually, using vim instead of something like vscode increases productivity eventually. It does take a little bit of time.
When we couple our productivity with centrally hosted services, we greatly diminish our freedom to be productive on a wide range of problem areas. I don't say this to brag, it is to maximize all of our freedom.
In my view, most of us SHOULD be working on "sensitive" things. There is so, so much work to be done for the cause of freedom and liberty in software. We need to reserve that capability in us, we cannot let nameless people have an inside access to our expression.
I was born in the 70's, and I can tell you, you can survive just fine without a cellphone.
All of what you describe can be done on a desktop. But hey, if you want to compromise your privacy for some convenience, that's your choice.
Will you carry your desktop in your car while living on the road? In the middle of forests and on top of mountains?
Will you work from a campsite with your desktop while not connected to the internet?
Can you have a meeting via your desktop from a rocky beach and no internet service?
A cellphone can't track what I type on my laptop, and it can't read encrypted comms my laptop makes to remote systems. I can put a cellphone in a distant location and use a portable, open source router with a VPN on the router, with encrypted, private DNS.
Not everyone lives inside a comfortable little box. There are all kinds of ways to do life.
Talking about integrating the code into the LLM, others get the same benefit that you are getting, so I don't really see the issue.
So you can either develop everything on your own, or you can leverage LLM's, helping both yourself and others.