GitHub Introduces AI-Powered Coding Assistant: GitHub Models

Introducing GitHub Models: A new generation of AI engineers on GitHub

Every developer can be an AI engineer with the right tools and training. From playground to coding with the model in Codespaces to production deployment via Azure, GitHub Models shows developers how simple it can be GitHub, the world's leading AI-powered developer platform, today announced the launch of GitHub Models, enabling more than 100 million developers to become AI engineers and build with industry-leading AI models. From Llama 3.1, to GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, to Phi 3 or Mistral Large 2, developers can access each model via a built-in playground that lets them test different prompts and model parameters, for free right in GitHub. In the new interactive model playground, students, hobbyists, startups, and more can explore the most popular private and open models from Meta, Mistral, Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft, and others with just a few clicks and keystrokes. Developers can experiment, compare, test, and deploy AI applications right where they manage their source code. In alignment with GitHub and Microsoft's continued commitment to privacy and security, no prompts or outputs in GitHub Models will be shared with model providers, nor used to train or improve the models. "Today, we democratise AI for the many. With GitHub Models, more than 100 million developers can now access and experiment with new AI models where their workflow is -- directly on GitHub," said GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke."This means that every developer in India on GitHub can become an AI engineer, generating a new wave of AI applications that stand to accelerate India's competitive advantage in the age of AI. "In the years ahead, we will continue to democratise access to AI technologies to generate a groundswell of one billion developers. By doing so, we will enable 10% of the world's population to build and advance breakthroughs that will accelerate human progress for us all," added Dohmke. GitHub has also created a glide path to bring the models to a developer's environment in Codespaces and VS Code. Once a developer is ready to go to production, Azure AI offers built-in responsible AI, enterprise-grade security & data privacy, and global availability, with provisioned throughput and availability in over 25 Azure regions for some models. Test and compare different models Every piece of software is unique. And likewise, every model is unique in its capabilities, performance, and cost. Mistral offers low latency, while GPT-4o is excellent at building multimodal applications that might demand audio, vision, and text in real time. Some advanced scenarios might require the integration of different modes, such as an embeddings model for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). With the suite of models, developers will have all the options they need to stay in the flow, experiment more, and learn faster than ever before. And this is just the first wave. In the months ahead, as the general availability of GitHub Models approaches, GitHub will continue to add more language, vision, and other models to the platform. Spin up Codespaces to bring ideas to life With the power of Codespaces, GitHub has created a zero-friction path for users to experiment with the model inference code before dropping it into the project. With sample code for a variety of languages and frameworks of all types ready to go, developers can try out various scenarios without ever hitting "works on my machine" problems. Then, once a developer is ready, it's a breeze to get things running in the project. They can use the knowledge gained from the playground and Codespaces to set up a prototype or proof-of-concept within their own applications. Run prompt evals in GitHub Actions with a series of JSON files that users just pipe in the GitHub Models command within the GitHub CLI. Or they can leverage GitHub Models to build a GitHub Copilot Extension, extending GitHub's platform ecosystem for every stage of software development. And finally, developers go to production with Azure AI by replacing their GitHub personal access token with an Azure subscription and credential. "As an AI startup founder and open source maintainer, GitHub Models enables my team to access and experiment with various LLMs in one place. This streamlines our development and lowers the entry barrier for building AI apps," said Anand Chowdhary, Co-founder of FirstQuadrant. The creator network for the age of AI From the creation of AI through open source collaboration, to the creation of software with the power of AI, to enabling the rise of the AI engineer with GitHub Models-GitHub is the creator network for the age of AI. The path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) will not be built without the source code and collaboration of the interconnected community on GitHub. GitHub Copilot is foundationally changing the speed of software production, already writing nearly 50% of code in files where it's enabled. With GitHub Copilot Workspace, GitHub envisions a world where millions of novice, hobbyist, and professional developers alike can code with entirely human language. And now with GitHub Models, more than 100 million developers can access and experiment with new AI models where they already manage their source code, issues, pull requests, workflows, and repositories -- directly on GitHub. Today, GitHub begins the limited public beta for GitHub Models. Developers can sign up now here. About GitHub As the global home for all developers, GitHub is the world's leading AI-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across 420+ million repositories. With all the collaborative features of GitHub, it's never been easier for individuals and teams to write faster, better code.

GitHub Thinks It's Hugging Face

With GitHub Models, over 100 million developers can now access and experiment with top AI models where their workflow is - directly on GitHub. Microsoft's GitHub is on a roll. The company recently announced the launch of GitHub Models which will offer developers access to leading LLMs, including Llama 3.1, GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini, Phi 3, and Mistral Large 2. "You can access each model via a built-in playground that lets you test different prompts and model parameters, for free, right in GitHub," the company said in its blog post. "GitHub Models marks another transformational journey of GitHub. From the creation of AI through open source collaboration, to the creation of software with the power of AI, to enabling the rise of the AI engineer with GitHub Models - GitHub is the creator network for the age of AI," said Github chief Thomas Dohmke. With GitHub Models, the platform seeks to be more than just an AI pair programmer reliant on OpenAI's models. Developers now have access to the latest LLMs and can experiment to find the one that best suits their needs. Just as 'natural language' has become a prominent programming language, GitHub is positioning LLMs as the go-to framework to develop new software and products. With GitHub Models, over 100 million developers can now access and experiment with top AI models where their workflow is - directly on GitHub. This will allow developers to build AI applications whereever they manage their code. "With GitHub Models, developers can now explore these models on GitHub, integrate them into their dev environment in Codespaces and VS Code, and leverage them during CI/CD in Actions - all simply with their GitHub account and free entitlements," explained Dohmke. GitHub is high on confidence as its financial performance has been equally impressive. During Microsoft's recent earnings call, chief Satya Nadella said, "Copilot is driving GitHub growth overall. GitHub's annual revenue run rate is now $2 billion." He further added, "Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub's revenue growth this year and is already a larger business than GitHub was when we acquired it." The AI-powered coding assistant now has 1.3 million paid subscribers, marking a 30% increase quarter-over-quarter, according to Nadella. Meanwhile, GitHub Copilot Business has secured 50,000 enterprise customers across various industries. This year, Accenture plans to deploy the tool to 50,000 developers. Other notable enterprise customers include Goldman Sachs, Etsy, and Dell Technologies, Nadella said. Github Models seems to be inspired by Hugging Face. Hugging Face also provides the ability to test out different models. It offers Git-based code repositories, pre-trained models for NLP, computer vision and audio tasks, datasets for translation and speech recognition, and spaces for small-scale demos of machine learning applications. Recently, NVIDIA developed a playground called NVIDIA NIM, which hosts several open-source models covering reasoning, vision, retrieval, biology, and more. LMSYS Chat and Groq also offer playgrounds to try out different LLMs but none of them offer the capability to write code and build apps. Hugging Face recently partnered with NVIDIA to offer inference as a service. These new capabilities will enable developers to rapidly deploy leading LLMs, such as the Llama 3 family and Mistral AI models, with optimisation from NVIDIA NIM microservices running on NVIDIA DGX Cloud. Supposedly, GitHub Models also looks very familiar to Azure AI Studio, with Microsoft bringing it under GitHub so that developers who are active on GitHub can experiment with it. "Seems like this is a sales funnel for Azure's OpenAI/LLM gateway with GitHub as a proxy(?). It's a bit unclear. Regardless, I'd be pretty wary of adding either Azure or GitHub as a core dependency to any of my apps at this point with how poor uptime seems to be at both lately," posted one user on Hacker News. Even if it is true, this definitely seems to be an attempt by Microsoft to make GitHub a one-stop solution for developers to build AI applications. Dohmke quipped, "The path to AGI will not be built without the source code and collaboration of the interconnected community on GitHub." However, during his recent visit to India, he expressed different views on AGI. "I think everybody has a different understanding of what AGI even means and what the G is. I think today I see no sign that machine learning models, or large language models, have sentience. They are not creative. They are machines created by us that help us with the things that we want to do," he said in an interaction with AIM. Moreover, he believes that GitHub will enable 100 million developers to become AI engineers and AI won't take away the jobs of developers. "In many ways this new age of AI has actually created more demand for developers because now somebody also has to build all the AI systems. "When you embark on a new job, whether fresh out of college or transitioning from another company, the primary challenge is understanding the company's operations and code bases, which could be thousands of files," he said. A tool like Copilot could be very useful for entry-level coders. Moreover, Dohmke believes that going forward, applicants will be expected to be adept at using AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT. "Some software companies have even begun incorporating Copilot into their interview processes, replacing traditional coding exercises with tasks that assess applicants' ability to utilise these tools effectively," Dohmke said.

Microsoft's GitHub launches playground for AI models

Microsoft's developer platform GitHub has announced GitHub Models, an interactive sandbox environment for developers and engineers to explore different AI models for free. Leading models like Meta AI's Llama 3.1, OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, Mistral AI's Mistral Large 2 and Cohere's Command will be among the options available. The playground's beta version has been made available to a limited group of people. Developers can use GitHub Models to deploy AI models via the built-in playground, test different prompts and model parameters and then launch them into environments like GitHub Codespaces and Visual Studio Code. GitHub Copilot launches premium enterprise AI coding assistant GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke believes that the democratic tool will have a huge impact on its userbase in India in a way that "every developer in India on GitHub can become an AI engineer, generating a new wave of AI applications that stand to accelerate India's competitive advantage in the age of AI." Much like platforms like Hugging Face, GitHub Models also helps developers export and integrate their code into existing workflows making it even easier for them. (For top technology news of the day, subscribe to our tech newsletter Today's Cache) Model playgrounds have also been on the offering from cloud providers including Microsoft Azure and even OpenAI. However, Azure's playground can only be used by their customers who will have to complete a pre-defined workflow specific to the cloud computing platform before signing up. On the other hand, GitHub's models can be used immediately. Users can then switch to Azure. Developers who are interested in using GitHub Models can sign up to a waitlist. Read Comments