I don't know about that. Geneology has been a hobby for me for a couple decades and I'd say only tech illiterates were willing to trust 23 and me. I've never seen any company I've worked at do well enough with security that I'd trust them with my DNA and with the constant data breaches across the industry with zero consequential penalties, this seems like the norm. Have you ever seen security done right anywhere? In my experience, it's always the bare minimum. Banks are about as close as it gets and that's only because they have higher obligations than most.

It's not crucial that it beat ChatGPT this year. That's a pretty unattainable goal for a group like Replit. From the users POV, none of the current copilots compare favorably against ChatGPT, even Microsoft's OpenAI-powered GitHub Copilot.

What's important is that they're preparing for the future by building all the tooling/UI/UX around coding copilots. This way, when costs and feasibility of building ChatGPT-quality LLM's drop and multiple open-source models are available, Replit has the ability to immediately drop them into their production environment. They'll also have the skills and systems to finetune any new models and wring extra performance out of them.

This is more important to users than it seems at first because current UX of things like GitHub Copilot don't allow me to use their AI against my codebase the way that I want to (the way I use ChatGPT). Right now GitHub Copilot is a glorified auto-complete, but I want it to do widespread scaffolding, refactoring, and analysis across my whole codebase. Microsoft has access to LLM's that can do this through their control of OpenAI -- but Microsoft lacks the tooling/UI/UX to bring the power of ChatGPT to me as a user of VSCode/IntelliJ/PyCharm/Visual Studio.

So if Replit can find more innovative, boundary-pushing ways of integrating LLM's, they won't necessarily need the highest quality LLM's to produce a superior user experience. It's a strong signal that Replit is well-positioned for the future, when ChatGPT-like models are democratized.

Hopefully JetBrains is paying attention. They definitely have time to wait a bit more (1-2 years?), but not a lot of time. JetBrains shouldn't solely rely on Github Copilot plug-in to provide their users with LLM's, because it's not clear that the user experience of that plug-in will stay competitive with the user experience that GitHub Copilot will offer directly in VSCode. The IntelliJ/PyCharm plugin may remain "just a fancy auto-complete" while VSCode gets more interactive workflows.

Future IDE's with LLM integration require novel, smart, clever UX typically invented only by very creative people.

It's also worth noting that Replit is not just trying to be an IDE -- they're also building a marketplace to buy/sell coding work, and establishing a small foothold as a niche cloud computing provider.