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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I suspect Microsoft would earn more money by doing this.

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.

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> is probably irrelevant when outsiders can already decompile binaries and learn far more.

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.

It would be surprising to me if their internal engineers don't already have access to a model trained on internal Microsoft code.

You are assuming Microsoft code base is superior to Linux / Git / MySql / whatever else is in github right now. That is a .... big assumption.

And if Microsoft's code ends up influencing the rest of the world code that would be a .... big downside.

Not for Microsoft it wouldn’t, which was their point.

Without a myriad of dumbasses like me being able to commit to Microsoft vs Github, I'd assume Microsoft's average is better than Github's.

That is a... bold assumption to make. Not just for Microsoft but for any large corporation.

I'm not saying bad code doesn't exist there. My thought is that the percent of bad code increases with volume (or at least higher number of producers). Tens of millions of people committing to Github should mean its more cluttered with garbage than in MS. I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans. That's at least more than nothing.

" I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans." -- that is a .... big assumption.

No, it really isn't when we're dealing with an organization that is audited for SOC 1/2, DoD, and likely others.

Are you sure?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/hack-of-a-microsoft...

The Azure-State-Department breach had nearly a half dozen contributing bugs...

And how does that compare to all the bugs on Github?

My friend - Chinese secret services read Secretary of Commerce's emails because of Microsoft's security leaks: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/commerce-secretary-gina-raim...

So yeah, assuming Microsoft systems are up to standard or have security reviews or whatever is a .... big assumption.

My friend, nobody implied that any of these things result in a foolproof system.

Do you have the exact style of talking in all your comments lol?

Yup, individuals struggling to have impact will cut corners and heavily impact tech debt :P

> That is a... bold assumption to make. Not just for Microsoft but for any large corporation.

I dunno; the average project on github isn't code-reviewed, while all the projects at Microsoft are.

I have a friend who worked at Microsoft... if his opinion is anything to go by that's very far from true.

I don't think you should be looking at the best of the Microsoft/GitHub corpora to gauge their overall quality. You probably want to be looking at the quality of the median project, which is going to be heavily influenced by the long tail of low quality projects.

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.

I would think if the LLM knew it was rookie code, it could actually be pretty useful, no?

Now I'm wondering if the copilot AI (GPT3/4?) takes number of stars/forks/etc into account during the training process.

> You are assuming Microsoft code base is superior to Linux / Git / MySql / whatever else is in github right now.

How do you get that impression from the comment? I don't see anything implying that.

> Code style of the whole world would be pushed towards 'Microsoft style'

Yes, that's exactly what the world needs, more software like Teams.

I mean, microsoft's code is probably better than the github average. There's an awful lot of horrific code out there.

I don't know about MSFT, but I bet this would really help Google a ton. With a mono-repo and huge focus on readability, not to mention how many thousands of SWEs spend the majority of their time slinging protobufs around, it seems a significant fraction of day-to-day code could be largely automated.

Google absolutely has their own internal models that do exactly this. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft indeed does have an internal Copilot that is trained on their data, but even on the smallest risk that they leak their code, they wouldn't share that particular model.

What does "absolutely has" mean here? Have you actually heard anything about such internal models?

Why wouldn’t they? Meta does, and they write openly about it

This is incorrect and not how Copilot works. My company just hosted two MS engineers to explain it live to 175 of us.

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.

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