Microsoft’s GitHub Expands AI Coding Tools with Anthropic and Google Models

Microsoft is updating its AI coding assistant on GitHub with the help of its tech partners Google and Anthropic to provide additional options for developers, enhance coding firepower.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30, 2024 — Microsoft-owned GitHub today revealed that it has adopted new artificial intelligence models from Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its GitHub Copilot, which is a beneficial coding tool for millions of developers. The announcement was made at GitHub’s Universe conference and aimed at increasing the options for the developers with an inclusion of models from AI suppliers other than the OpenAI which is its primary affiliate.

At first, people on GitHub can chat with Gemini and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to get help and ask questions. Soon, these features will be built into the core GitHub Copilot platform. This will let the models write code in answer to developer commands. Following its early relationship with OpenAI, this move makes GitHub even more of a leader in using generative AI to speed up repetitive coding tasks.

That statement from Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO, has ensured that OpenAI is still the preferred model when it comes to Copilot. However, developers have an option of using the Google or the Anthropic model if they wish to. This flexibility is consistent with Github’s tradition of diversifying independent relationships regardless of the partner’s manufacturing products that compete with Microsoft’s. Dohmke, also added that Anthropic’s model will be run on AWS – Amazon Web Services. This goes further to indicate that GitHub is keen on partnering with customers on the major cloud service providers including Amazon and Google Cloud.

Microsoft, which bought GitHub in 2018, has offered similar flexibility in AI models within its Azure cloud computing, but the current services in Azure do not include Google and Anthropic. To address the different needs of many customers, rather than offering them limited options while working with only one company, Microsoft, GitHub plans to diversify AI models in GitHub Copilot.

GitHub added more model options and announced a new AI-powered project called Spark. This project lets users make small apps using plain English prompts instead of code. This tool is made so that people who aren’t programmers can make apps like trip logs with maps or event RSVP trackers, and experienced developers can make the code that the tool makes better. Spark apps can be moved to GitHub Copilot or Microsoft’s Power Platform to be worked on even more.

Dohmke talked about how AI is changing the way software is made: “The size of the Lego blocks that Copilot on AI can generate has grown…” There’s no way AI could write a whole GitHub or Facebook, but as it gets better, the building blocks will get bigger.

This addition shows Microsoft’s bigger plan to use AI across all of its platforms and gives coders a wide range of AI choices, with the goal of making the software development process easier and faster.