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Does Codex learn from the code I write?

No, OpenAI Codex does not learn or retain information from the code you write during your individual sessions. Each interaction with Codex is independent, and the system doesn’t update its underlying model based on your specific code or projects. This design choice is intentional and serves important privacy and security purposes, ensuring that your proprietary code, business logic, and sensitive information remain confidential and don’t inadvertently influence the model’s responses to other users. When you end a Codex session or start a new task, the system begins fresh without any memory of previous conversations or code you’ve worked on together.

However, while Codex doesn’t learn from your individual code, it does maintain context within a single session or task. This means that during an ongoing conversation or while working on a specific project, Codex can remember what you’ve discussed, understand the codebase structure you’re working with, and maintain consistency across multiple interactions within that session. For example, if you’re working on a web application and define a specific database schema early in the session, Codex will remember and use that schema when generating related code later in the same task. This session-level context awareness makes Codex more effective at understanding your project’s specific requirements and conventions without compromising long-term privacy.

The training process for Codex involves learning from large datasets of publicly available code repositories, but this training happens at the model development stage, not from individual user interactions. OpenAI uses techniques like differential privacy and other privacy-preserving methods during the training process to ensure that the model learns general programming patterns and best practices without memorizing specific code snippets that could compromise individual developers’ intellectual property. This approach allows Codex to be knowledgeable about programming concepts and patterns while respecting user privacy. Organizations using Codex can configure additional privacy controls, and enterprise versions may offer features like zero data retention (ZDR) to provide even stronger privacy guarantees for sensitive development work.

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