But what about the potential for intellectual property problems?

That's beside the point, which is that the output copilot produces is useful.

I don't see how that's besides the point. How can it be that useful if the output is a such legal mystery?

I'd love to use it but not when there's such a risk of compromising the code base.

What do you use it for?

Coding, I actually had to forbid it today in a course I teach because it solves all the exercises :) (given unit tests with titles students needed to fill those tests in)

Isn't that just because others have stored solutions to these problems in GitHub?

Probably, also I’m sure 99%+ of the code I author isn’t groundbreaking and someone did it before.

That is my question too. Is it a fancier autocomplete? Or does it reason about code?

It reasons over the semantic network between tokens, in a feedforward inference pass over the 2k(ish) words or tokens of the prompt. Sometimes that reasoning is superficial and amounts to probabilistic linear relationships, but it can go deeply abstract depending on training material, runtime/inference parameters, and context of the prompt.

In some sense you could think of as a fancy autocomplete which uses not only code but also comments as input, looks up previous solutions for the same problem but (mostly) appropriately replaces the variable names to those that you are using.