[HN Gopher] Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim /...
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       Show HN: Codeium: Free Copilot Alternative for Vim / Neovim
        
       I'm Varun from the Codeium team. After support for VSCode,
       Jetbrains, Jupyter, and Colab, we are super excited to bring free
       AI-powered code autocomplete to Vim and Neovim.  And in the spirit
       of Show HN, we have a playground version for anyone to try the tech
       in the browser without any installation
       (https://www.codeium.com/playground)! We also made the vim client
       open source and are open to contributions.
        
       Author : varunkmohan
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2023-01-18 20:43 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | zabil wrote:
       | Trying this out on neovim. Is there a way to use another key
       | combination to accept the auto completion instead of a Tab?
       | 
       | This is to avoid clashing with nvim-cmp's tab configuration.
       | copilot plugin uses an alt-l combination to accept the suggestion
       | for example
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | Thanks for the feedback. Currently there is not, but we will
         | look into setting up custom keybindings or some other approach.
        
       | bonsaisai wrote:
       | Is this OK? Autocomplete suggests the text with what appears to
       | be someone's username.
       | 
       | https://freeimage.host/i/HaLPXDB
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | We are actively iterating on our data cleaning to deanonymize
         | any user information. Of course some cases are tricky to find,
         | but we recognize these issues are serious and will continue to
         | work here. All of our training data is public, so we know that
         | we won't ever produce private user info.
        
       | gkfasdfasdf wrote:
       | How is this free exactly? The cost to running a quality model is
       | certainly not zero or even cheap. Is this explained anywhere?
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | It isn't zero, that's for sure! Before Codeium, we as a team
         | were building scalable ML infrastructure for some of the
         | world's largest ML workloads, so we have a lot of experience in
         | building infra (especially ML serving infra) that optimizes
         | computation on GPUs/mixed compute resources to drastically
         | reduce serving costs. We will probably talk more about these
         | infra side optimizations in future blog posts!
        
           | nequo wrote:
           | What is your monetization strategy? What additional features
           | are you planning that will generate revenue?
        
           | sva_ wrote:
           | Not a very elegant way of tip-toeing around the question of
           | "how do you finance this?/what's the catch?"
        
       | askiiart wrote:
       | Not to be confused with Codium [1], a completely FOSS, telemetry-
       | free build of VS Code
       | 
       | https://vscodium.com/
        
         | tmtvl wrote:
         | Per the docs*, not _completely_ telemetry-free, yet an
         | admirable attempt.
         | 
         | * https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | Yes, good point. Interestingly, our VSCode extension also works
         | on VSCodium since we uploaded it to the OpenVSX registry!
        
           | askiiart wrote:
           | Awesome! If it weren't for Microsoft's... basically monopoly
           | on extensions, I'd be all over Codium.
        
       | cschmatzler wrote:
       | Which languages do you support? My main work is in Elixir, where
       | Copilot is incredibly weak. It's completely understandable that
       | less training data for less popular languages means worse
       | performance, but it'd be interesting to hear whether you're
       | trying to alleviate that limitation for more niche languages
       | somehow.
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | Elixir is not a language we are currently confident in, but in
         | the very near future (O(weeks)), we believe we will have a
         | model that is better than Copilot for Elixir and other niche
         | languages.
        
       | freedomben wrote:
       | Does this use GPT-3 or something else on the background? If not,
       | what is the source of the training data?
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | We don't rely on any 3rd party APIs in order to keep serving
         | costs down (which is necessary to keep this as a free service).
         | We only use permissively licensed public code to train.
        
           | honkler wrote:
           | be explicit about it. what is "permissively licensed"?
        
           | jen20 wrote:
           | What counts as permissively licensed? The FAQ is mealy-
           | mouthed about this.
        
             | NicoleJO wrote:
             | He won't answer because he's following OpenAI's criminal
             | footsteps.
        
               | elorm wrote:
               | * * *
        
               | RockRobotRock wrote:
               | Totally unbiased opinion from someone who sells their own
               | GPT-like software.
        
               | NicoleJO wrote:
               | There's no GPT in my software, nor does it work like it.
               | 
               | Anything else you care to be wrong about?
        
       | Bilal_io wrote:
       | Your playground doesn't work well with Firefox on Android 13
       | (pixel 4a). The keyboard keeps getting hijacked.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | Sorry to hear that. Point noted, we will take a look - most of
         | our testing has been on chrome / safari.
        
       | renewiltord wrote:
       | How does this work? Does it ship a model to me and do it all
       | locally? I love Copilot (one of my favourite subscriptions) but I
       | can't use it on a plane. Would love to do this and just toggle
       | between the two.
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | No the model actually runs remotely. We would love to have some
         | way to run a lightweight model on the user's machines but it's
         | just not feasible given model size and amount of computation
         | required.
        
           | delijati wrote:
           | What are the current requirements to run that model?
        
           | honkler wrote:
           | nah. We know it's because if people had the model with them,
           | they wouldn't pay you.
        
             | varunkmohan wrote:
             | We are a free product.
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | only for first few customers. After that you'll want new
               | customers to open their wallets for you. You are not a
               | charity. So cut the BS please.
        
               | varunkmohan wrote:
               | I don't really want to argue but we have been pretty open
               | about the fact that we want to keep this product free for
               | users going forward as well. We have been pretty clear
               | about our plan to monetize additional features but the
               | focus now is to democratize this technology.
        
               | nequo wrote:
               | > we have been pretty open about the fact that we want to
               | keep this product free for users going forward as well
               | 
               | I think that parent's tone is way too combative. But the
               | "Pricing" page on your website[1] only says that the
               | service is free for early users.                 One Plan
               | It's pretty simple. Early users get free forever access
               | to Codeium.
               | 
               | It does not say whether all future users will have to pay
               | or only those who want additional features. The wording
               | strongly suggests the former.
               | 
               | [1] https://www.codeium.com/pricing
        
             | space_fountain wrote:
             | Have you looked at the size of these models these days? Do
             | you have the compute to run a model that takes up 100s of
             | gigs just in hard drive space?
        
               | honkler wrote:
               | yeah, i know, and I have a good enough system to run
               | these models. Google "fauxpilot".
        
               | space_fountain wrote:
               | Do you find the quality comparable to copilot? That's
               | still an order of magnitude fewer parameters than copilot
               | uses?
        
       | s17n wrote:
       | Just out of curiosity, is there a reason that both this and
       | copilot support Vim but not Emacs?
        
         | varunkmohan wrote:
         | This is one of the next IDEs we will be supporting! We're
         | keeping folks on our discord
         | (https://discord.com/invite/3XFf78nAx5) updated on this.
        
         | gandalfgeek wrote:
         | You can use https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el to get
         | Copilot completions in Emacs.
         | 
         | Video explainer: https://youtu.be/dZMGH_3UdSE
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | harryvederci wrote:
         | Because Vim is better than Emacs.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-18 23:00 UTC)