I buy that "generated code" will not add anything to the training set, and that Copilot doesn't help for having good data or (directly) better algorithms. However, the feedback loop I am pointing at is when you accept suggestions on Copilot. I think it is learning from human feedback on what solutions people select. If the model is "finetuned" to the specific dev's coding style, I would expect Codex to suggest even better code (because of high quality of finetuning data) to someone at OAI than me or you.

How much of this is 'quality of code' vs. 'quality of data'?

I'm pointing at overall gains in dev's productivity. This could be used for collecting more data, which, AFAIK, happens by collecting automatically data from the internet using code (although possibly the business collaboration between OAI and github helped). Most of the dev work would then be iteratively cleaning that data, running trainings, changing the architecture, etc. before getting to the performance they'd want, and those cycles would be a tiny bit faster using such tools.

To be clear, I'm not saying that talented engineers are coding much faster today. They're probably doing creative work at the edge of what Codex has seen. However, we're using the first version of something that, down the line, might end up giving us decent speed increases (I've been increasingly more productive the more I've learned how to use it). A company owning such model would certainly have private access to better versions to use internally, and there are some strategic considerations in not sharing the next version of its code generating model to win a race, while collecting feedback from millions of developers.

Wait, they did plain forbid you to use at all during work time, or they forbid to use its outputs for IT issues? Surely, using Codex for inspiration, given a natural language prompt and looking at what function it calls does not seem to infringe any copyright rules?

• 1) If you start with your own variable names, it would auto-complete with those, maybe using something he learned online. would that count as plagiarism in your sense? How would that differ from copy-pasting from stack overflow changing the variable names (I'm not an expert in SO copyright terms but you should probably quote SO if doing so and there might be some rules about distributing it commercially).
• 2) imagine you are using line-by-line auto-complete, and sometimes you re-arrange the ordering of the lines, adding your own code, even modifying it a bit. At one point does it become your own code?
• 3) In the cases 1. and 2. that I mentioned above, even if some of the outputs were verbatim (which apparently happens a tiny fraction of the time) and had exactly the same (probably conventional) variable names, would "I have some line of code with exact the same normal naming of variables on the internet" be enough for going to court?
• 4) Assuming that developers are, or will be, more productive using such tools, don't you think they would still use Copilot-like software to a) get inspiration b) copy-paste code that they would later modify to bypass IP infringements if they are smart enough about it, even though their companies "forbids" them from using it?

The problem with arguing against that claim is that nobody knows whether transformers/scaling language models are sufficient for full code automation. To take your nootropics example, an analogy would be if nootropics were legal, did not have negative side effects, with a single company giving "beta access" (for now) to a new nootropic in unlimited amount at no cost to a market of tens of millions of users, that the data from using this nootropic was collected by the company to improve the product, that there actually were 100k peer-reviewed publications per year in the field of nootropics, where most of the innovation behind the tech came from a >100B-parameters model trained on open-source nootropic chemistry instructions. Would such advancements be evidence for something major we're not certain about (e.g. high bandwidth brain computer interface) or just evidence for increased productivity that would be reinjected into more nootropic investments?

I created a class initializing the attributes you mentioned, and when adding your docstring to your function signature it gave me exactly the answer you were looking for. Note that it was all in first try, and that I did not think at all about the initialization for components, marginalized or observed—I simply auto-completed.

class Distribution:
    def __init__(self):
        self.components = []
        self.marginalized = None
        self.observed = None


def unobserved(self) -> Set[str]:

    """Returns a set of all unobserved random variable names inside this Distribution -- that is,

those that are neither observed nor marginalized over.

    """
    return set(self.components) - set(self.observed) - set(self.marginalized)