Co-Pilot: IDEs and Co-Generators

The idea behind co-pilot came from a combination of the existing autocomplete in IDEs that you see combined with sort of the emerging capabilities of machine learning models. In my time at Google, so Google has this giant monolithic code base and it has a very nice code search tool that helps you find code. And one thing I observed was that almost any time I was writing a piece of code, someone had probably written the same code somewhere else in the Google Monor repo. From there, it seemed pretty plausible that a machine learning model could be trained on this type of data and learn those patterns.