About whether GitHub Copilot is really intelligent or just a code search engine.
Has this happened?
Yes 85 (66%)Not sure 14 (11%)No 29 (23%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether GitHub Copilot is really intelligent or just a code search engine.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
How do you know it's "just a code search engine"? Or "not AI" or "not learning and producing new things", or all the other claims people are making about it? All of these are essentially untestable statements.
It has memorized one thing. That doesn't prove it's not intelligent. If anything it's the other way around, we would expect an intelligent being to be capable of memorization.
All I can think of is the Turing test and the AI effect. Eventually we will have an AI that is capable of writing code indistinguishable from a human, and people will STILL say it's "not AI" and "just a code search engine", etc. Obviously this isn't there yet, but it's clearly getting closer.