HuggingFace and ServiceNow reveal Github Copilot rival
It looks to be good, too
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GitHub Copilot finally has a worthy rival thanks to a collaboration between Hugging Face and ServiceNow, who formed a community of developers that go by the name BigCode.
Despite having no affiliation with GitHub, the StarCoder and StarCoderBase code LLMs were trained on data from GitHub, which the team says was “permissively licensed,” likely in a nod to thelegal action that GitHub facedfor failing to attribute some of the code it used.
More than 80 programming languages, Git commits, GitHub issues, and Jupyter notebooks went into creating the AI assistant for developers over the course of more than six months, with a separate version trained specifically with Python in mind.
StarCoder takes on GitHub Copilot
According to theannouncement, StarCoder was found to have outperformed other existing open code LLMs in some cases, including theOpenAImodel that powered early versions of GitHub Copilot.
It also promises to be able to process more code than other tools, thanks to a context length of over 8,000 tokens.
As well as being able to write, suggest, and fix code, Hugging Face also explained that StarCoder can act as a tech assistant, answering programming-related questions to help in other areas of developers’ workflows.
The best AI writers>Github Copilot X uses GPT-4 to polish off your code>Code-generating tools could be more of a security hindrance than help
An early v0.1 version of HuggingChat can be triedonlinewhich opens using ‘OpenAssistant/oasst-sft-6-llama-30b’ that promises to be “a good alternative toChatGPT.” There is an option to change the model to ‘BigCode/StarCoder’, the self-proclaimed “good model for answering technical questions.”
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BigCode, the body behind the model, is a project intended to responsibly develop LLMs led by ServiceNow and Hugging Face. Besides the core members, it invites contributors and AI researchers to collaborate openly.
With several years’ experience freelancing in tech and automotive circles, Craig’s specific interests lie in technology that is designed to better our lives, including AI and ML, productivity aids, and smart fitness. He is also passionate about cars and the decarbonisation of personal transportation. As an avid bargain-hunter, you can be sure that any deal Craig finds is top value!
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