Google's answer to Microsoft's Github Co-Pilot

AND A new open-sourced competitor emerges

Author

The Alignment
March 28, 2023

Hello folks, The commoditisation of AI has begun, companies are releasing competitors at a blistering pace. Who will win this race ? We don't know, but it sure does look like everyone wants to participate.

As always if you enjoy reading our posts be sure to spread the word !

Here’s what we have lined up for you today -

  1. Google announces partnership with Replit to rival Microsoft’s Github Copilot

  2. AI hardware startup Cerebras releases open source GPT models

  3. Microsoft has launched Co-Pilot for Cybersecurity

Microsoft’s acquisition of Github has been a wildly successful endeavour. Github’s co-pilot was perhaps the first large-scale use of Large Language Models used by millions of people to boost productivity.

Now, Google is entering the Generative AI for Software Development arena with the announcement of their partnership with Replit. Replit is a platform that allows developers to spin up applications in minutes using their browser based IDE. It has over 20 million developers in its ecosystem and is known for its strong developer community. Replit also has a co-pilot competitor called "Ghostwriter".

The partnership between Google and Replit will give Replit developers direct access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services and foundation models. In exchange, developers on Google Cloud and Workspace will get access to the Replit collaborative code editing platform.

This is a classic strategy for Google. Rather than building something from scratch, establishing a partnership with Replit helps them directly start competing with Github’s capabilities and scale. Alphabet’s independent growth fund Capital G has also invested in Github Co-Pilot competitor magic.dev. With competition heating up, AI is getting commoditised faster than we can catch our breath.

Talking about commoditisation, AI chip and hardware startup Cerebras has released its family of Cerebraas-GPT models. The release consists of 7 GPT models ranging from 111m to 13 B parameters.

These models are completely open-sourced, a move counter reactive to the industry leaders move of becoming closed-sourced as a whole. The company claims these models have lower training times, lower training cost and use less energy than any existing public models.

What’s novel is that these models have been trained exclusively on the company’s flagship AI hardware, the Cerebras CS-2 system. The models will also be able to run on NVIDIA’s hardware.

The open-source vs closed-source debate continues. OpenAI is adamant that closed sourced is the right decision (given safety and competition concerns) while the likes of Cerebras and StabilityAI are certain that only open sourced systems will push the industry forward.

Microsoft’s product strategy seems to be simple these days. Add co-pilot to all software products that they have.

Powered by GPT-4 along with Microsoft’s custom security models, the offering is aimed at enterprises identifying security threats to their products. Microsoft claims that it’s not using customer data to power this product but instead relies on 65 trillion daily signals it collects in its threat intelligence gathering.

Security analysts can use the co-pilot by conversing with it in natural language and can save search queries to share with their teams. Microsoft claims that the product is not perfect and will hallucinate from time to time.

The product is in preview mode and only available to select customers today. But just like Github and Microsoft 365 co-pilot, Microsoft has big ambitions for this product.

Around the industry -

  1. Asana launches new work intelligence tools with AI on the way

  2. GPT4All, a new 7B LLM based on LLaMa. Run GT locally on your macbook

  3. GPT based citation first search engine Perplexity raises $25.6 Million series A

  4. Britain opts for 'adaptable' AI rules, with no single regulator

  5. Covariant’s CEO on building AI that helps robots learn

Product Corner -

There are way too many cool products to showcase just one !

  • Elicit.org : The AI research assistant

  • Neptyne : The AI programmable spreadsheet

  • Lexica : The stable diffusion search engine

  • Kissan GPT : AI voice assistant for underserved farmers in India

  • Bloop : Understand your codebase with GPT-4 + Semantic Code search

  • Next Three Books : Use AI to find the next three books you should read

Generate movies and images from the humble Textbox with Genmo

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