GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke speaks at the Collision conference in Toronto on June 27, 2023.
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Microsoft Has a very expensive and very public relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI. But one of Microsoft’s most successful artificial intelligence products, GitHub Copilot, now goes beyond OpenAI to give developers more choices in the models they want to use.
GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, said in a blog post on Tuesday that developers will be able to use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model or Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro model, as a replacement for OpenAI’s GPT-4o if they choose.
“No one model can rule all scenarios, and developers want the agency to build with the model that works best for them,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said in the post. “It’s clear that the next phase of AI code generation will Not only defined by multi-model capabilities, but also by multi-model choices, today we achieve just that.”
Microsoft launched GitHub Copilot in 2021 to provide source code suggestions for software developers. Copilot relies on models from OpenAI, a company that has received billions in funding from Microsoft and has seen a surge in popularity since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
OpenAI’s o1-preview and o1-mini, designed for reasoning about hard problems, will also be available in Copilot Chat on the GitHub website and in the open source Visual Studio Code text editor. They are currently available in public preview. A spokesperson said Google’s model will be released in public preview in the coming weeks.
this arrive Doohmke said in an interview with CNBC last week that the o1 model launched by OpenAI in September prompted GitHub to consider adding a drop-down menu to Copilot to provide more choices. At that time, it felt like adding from Anthropic and GoogleDomke said.
He added that developers will be able to see which model is best suited for a given programming language, or adopt a model that meets the company’s requirements.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (right) meets OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on November 6, 2023.
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Many other Microsoft products, including Teams and Windows, use the OpenAI model. Microsoft continues to provide computing power to OpenAI, which is currently valued at US$157 billion. But relations between the two companies have been strained over the past year, following the sudden resignation and reinstatement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November. dramatic events It is said This angered Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
In February this year, Microsoft announced a partnership with Mistral, an early artificial intelligence model developer. The following month, Microsoft said it was recruiting employees from DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and his startup Inflection, whose Pi assistant competes with OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT. This summer, Microsoft listed OpenAI as a competitor in a regulatory filing.
Dohmke said that over the past month, GitHub has been working with engineering teams at Anthropic and Google on the security and scalability of its model.
“We plan to expand this list in the future, but there are no partnerships to announce yet,” he said, adding that GitHub doesn’t want to overwhelm developers with too many choices.
Also on Tuesday, GitHub announced that its Copilot will be able to quickly and automatically review code updates through public preview.
GitHub showed off a technical preview of a feature called Spark that can prototype apps based on text input and refine the design with just a few clicks. Developers will be able to modify the prototype’s underlying code. Anyone interested in trying Spark can join waiting list.
A GitHub spokesperson said that once access is granted, people using Spark will be able to choose between GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model.