Let Microsoft first publish a Copilot model that's trained on the internal codebases of Azure, Windows and Office. That's the only way Microsoft can convince me that they truly believe Copilot is non-infringing technology.
Their own engineers would get productivity boosts - with copilot already being familiar with data structures, code style, etc. would be a big boost to accuracy.
But also, third party code would end up being more similar. Code style of the whole world would be pushed towards 'Microsoft style', which probably makes hiring easier, less training time for engineers, etc.
And the downside, that is outsiders might learn tiny nuggets of info about microsoft sources, is probably irrelevant when outsiders can already decompile binaries and learn far more.
And if Microsoft's code ends up influencing the rest of the world code that would be a .... big downside.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/hack-of-a-microsoft...
The Azure-State-Department breach had nearly a half dozen contributing bugs...
So yeah, assuming Microsoft systems are up to standard or have security reviews or whatever is a .... big assumption.
I dunno; the average project on github isn't code-reviewed, while all the projects at Microsoft are.
IMO, the long tail of non-code-reviewed, written-by-someone-in-their-first-month-of-coding, barely-even-compiles noob code[0] in Github is going to be orders of magnitude larger than the long tail of crap in Microsoft's internal repos.
[0] Hey, everyone has to start somewhere. There's nothing wrong with your first "hello world" program being buggy - that's what being a beginner means. But it's probably not the sort of code you want to train an LLM on.
How do you get that impression from the comment? I don't see anything implying that.
Yes, that's exactly what the world needs, more software like Teams.
most, if not all microsoft products can have their sources be available for viewing, if you are one of those vip development partners. microsoft doesn't really have any secret source (pardon the pun) of which the leaking would undo their value proposition.
In fact, if microsft opened up their system a bit more, they might even gain some PR or mindshare, and have no effect on, if not increase, their bottom line.
The style applied by Copilot comes from your surrounding code context, not from the LLM. And that base, trained on all public repos from GitHub, knows everything about data structures, etc, in the languages that were scanned.
Nothing new would be gained by scanning MS's own repositories and nothing would be leaked or color the output in actual use.
- It does
- The user didn't turn off the filters that prevent this
- The user didn't intentionally make it do it
- This use is found to be illegal
There's a difference between code that needs to be kept private from bad actors (from their point of view at least) and code that is public but with restrictions on its use that anyone who gets it should be aware of. This is like saying "if you truly believe that license agreements are legally binding, then publish your user's passwords publically with a license saying no one can use them"
This being the real hurdle. With Microsoft money behind the defense, only megacorps can win.
I remember some guy representing himself and winning some dispute over shrink wrap licenses and student discounts.
Both worried about IP leaking but one side is worried about their IP leaking and the other worried about liability if they inadvertently implement any leaked IP. Either way, the concern is leaked IP.
Well, at least you'd hope so.
At least that's the case for art, and I think the same logic should apply to art and code.
But even if that were true, it’s a moot point because we are talking about the copyrighted content that the models were trained on. Hence the point the OP made that if Microsoft really wanted to reassure people then they’d promote models that were trained on Microsoft’s own code rather than handwave away these concerns with gestures of assuming theoretical liability.
This hasn't been tested in court.
This blog post refers to the broader ecosystem of Microsoft Copilot solutions. Most of those tools rely on the Azure OpenAI API service on the backend and are not specifically tailored for code generation.
LLM copilot doesn't really understand the context of the project, it just goes for similar text.
So if you train on big projects you're picking up their patterns only. When a copilot user asks for a string concatenation 'tip' you want LLM to output a general answer, not something tied to a specific project. Big project is likely to use abstraction over strings, where base library usage is shrunk down to few lines of code as opposed to abstraction. In this case you'd want LLM to source a few "simpler" projects that use base library strings abundantly, so it can have decent amount of text for the most likely correct match over user's input.
I do believe Microsoft has all the code available for good training, it's not only about Azure, Windows and Office, there is tons more and it's open source already.
We can already take a guess what many internal functions look like from the published symbol tables of every function across all major microsoft products. Simply ask copilot to write those functions and see if the code comes out better than a similar set of made up yet plausible function names.
It probably would not be a very desirable product in the end.