zlacker

Yes, they have a way. Even an algorithm given no access to anything but the copilot training data has a way, because it has temporal information: it says where the code appeared first! Github has the data, but doesn't give an easy way to search it, hmmm...

Although we can't rule out a common origin of shared code, including a common origin off github, we can know for sure that old code doesn't copy code from the future.

As to Microsoft and human developers having no clue about a piece of code's origin, thats especially false, since not only do we have timestamps on repositories, we can also easily verify that the code first appeared in the context of the csparse library, by Tim Davis, CS professor at Texas A&M who has worked on sparse matrix numerical methods his entire career.