Google has partnered with online IDE developer Replit to integrate its AI-based code suggestion tool into its cloud platform, in an attempt to challenge Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot is a programming tool powered by OpenAI’s Codex language model, which provides code suggestions based on comments and functions input by programmers, like a super autocomplete function.
Now Google also wants to be a part of it. According to the agreement with Replit, Google will give this startup company access to its massive computing resources and customized AI models. In return, Google will host and provide Replit’s code editing software on Google Cloud.
Specifically, Replit’s developers will gain access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and basic models through Ghostwriter – Replit’s software development AI. In turn, Google Cloud and Workspace developers will gain access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform.
Replit’s Ghostwriter code generator is directly integrated into the company’s browser-based online IDE, which can automatically complete code and respond to natural language queries. Replit CEO Amjad Masad believes this will help programmers increase productivity and make it easier for people to fix errors and collaborate with colleagues.
Replit claims to support more than 20 million developers and claims that its Ghostwriter robot has helped generate more than 30% of user code. Meanwhile, Microsoft is planning to upgrade its GitHub Copilot model to GPT-4.
AI programming tools are constantly improving over time. In addition to code completion, they can now generate code based on instructions in natural language text. However, these tools are not perfect, and even though they can help less experienced programmers write code, developers still need enough technical knowledge to judge whether their output is correct.
