It's not as good, but running small LLMs locally can work. I've been messing around with ollama, which makes it drop dead simple to try out different models locally.
You won't be running any model as powerful as ChatGPT - but for quick "stack overflow replacement" style of questions I find it's usually good enough.
And before you write off the idea of local models completely, some recent studies indicate that our current models could be made orders of magnitude smaller for the same level of capability. Think Moore's law but for shrinking the required connections within a model. I do believe we'll be able to run GPT3.5-level models on consumer grade hardware in the very near future. (Of course, by then GPT-7 may be running the world but we live in hope).
I'm aware. I looked into it regarding your source code being used to train their ML. I looked over the FAQ and got the "Your code is your own." vibe. Sadly it does point to their standard Privacy statement that could change anytime and allow them to do what they want.
No. We follow responsible practices in accordance with our Privacy Statement to ensure that your code snippets will not be used as suggested code for other users of GitHub Copilot.