In the last week or so, all the range online has been #OpenAI’s new chatbot called #ChatGPT (you can read more details on ChatGPT here ). This also got me thinking, about how can we use #CoPilot more than just code. GitHub CoPilot as you might recall is your #AI powered pair-programmer.
And as we can see below, it indeed is possible to use Codex as sort of a more general purpose usage. I start with the prompts on how one might use CoPilot – a function to read a file and return its contents as a string, just to show there isn’t anything different I am doing in using this. And then for general-purpose usage, I used the prompts in VSCode.
I missed the first ‘Q’ in the first question, but that didn’t throw it off. Also, there were typos in the other questions - for example in the third question on the most dangerous volcano.
All this is possible because Codex (which is the model that Copilot uses) is derived from GPT. This of course doesn’t mean that Copilot is replacing the chatbot - it doesn’t have the context in the dialogue turns, and hence the ‘memory’ of the conversation. It does mean that we can use Copilot for more general-purpose usage.
I also did a reverse engineering of sorts - asked Copilot to explain the code it wrote in the first place. Here is the explanation of the function:
And if you want to see the complete interaction (minus the code explanation), here is the video:
And of course, Woot means “woot” in woot :)))