Our video highlights selection for today is by data science industry luminary David Smith who made a presentation to the NYC Data Hackers on the topic of Copilot for R. If you haven’t come across Copilot before, it’s like an AI-based pair programmer that suggests new lines of code, and perhaps entire functions, based on context. In the presentation (video below) Smith shows how while he was editing in Visual Studio Code with Copilot enabled, it suggested tidyverse functions for cleaning a data set, and even the code for performing an analysis of variance:
It’s fun to take a behind-the-scenes look to see how Copilot uses Generative AI to make its suggestions. With the Azure OpenAI Service, you can access the underlying OpenAI Codex model directly, and generate code suggestions via its API. You can review an R script to access the OpenAI API directly using the httr2 package, and also an R function to call an OpenAI model.
GitHub (revodavid): Copilot for R
