Google Showcases New Generative AI Coding Assistants to Take on GitHub Copilot
Google introduced Gemini Code Assist at its Cloud Next event this week. The generative AI programming assistant is a rebranded and upgraded version of the Codey and Duet AI tools unveiled last year, now powered with the latest Gemini 1.5 Pro large language model and clearly set up to compete with Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, Hugging Face’s Starcoder, and most especially GitHub Copilot Enterprise.
Gemini Code Assist
Gemini Code Assist is designed to provide an enhanced AI code completion and assistance experience for developers. It integrates with code editors like Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs, and the Gemini 1.5 Pro model offers a potential mind-bogglingly large context window of a million tokens for better accuracy and supervision. The AI can also be fine-tuned with a company’s own codebase, a familiar feature to GitHub Enterprise users.
Notably, Gemini Code Assist can support codebases that are either on-premises or hosted on virtual platforms, an unusual level of flexibility that might help it compete with GitHub and others. To enhance its offerings, Google has collaborated with a range of developer-focused organizations, including Datadog, Datastax, and Stack Overflow, integrating their extensive knowledge bases into the Gemini ecosystem. The assistant is free for now but will start costing $19 a month per user in July.
“This landmark, multi-dimensional AI-focused partnership, which includes Stack Overflow adopting the latest AI technology from Google Cloud, and Google Cloud integrating Stack Overflow knowledge into its AI tools, underscores our joint commitment to unleash developer creativity, unlock productivity without sacrificing accuracy, and deliver on socially responsible AI,” Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said in a statement. “By bringing together the strengths of our two companies, we can accelerate innovation across a variety of industries.”
Supporting the new coding assistant, Google also debuted the new Gemini Cloud Assist tool at the conference. Cloud Assist, as the name suggests, aids cloud teams in creating and deploying applications on Google Cloud. It features capabilities for generating custom architecture configurations, diagnosing and resolving issues, and offering optimization recommendations for cost efficiency or performance enhancements. This tool is made available through a chat interface and is directly embedded into Google Cloud products. Alongside Gemini Code Assist, Google also introduced CodeGemma, a new addition to its open-source Gemma line of LLMs designed specifically for code generation and assistance. CodeGemma is accessible through Vertex AI.
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