GitHub Copilot is going multi-model, with the company unveiling a raft of new options for developers to draw from.
Developers will now have the option of using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini. They can either go with Copilot's default, or toggle between models during a conversation with Copilot Chat about the best model for particular use cases.
The move, announced at the GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco last week, aims to expand the variety of AI models to help cater to unique individual developer needs, according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
"In 2024, we experienced a boom in high-quality large and small language models that each individually excel at different programming tasks. There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them," he said.
"It is clear the next phase of AI code generation will not only be defined by multi-model functionality, but by multi-model choice. Today, we deliver just that."
Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet was made available via GitHub Copilot to coincide with the announcement, while Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro will be made available for users in the coming weeks, the company confirmed.
"Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at coding tasks and is broadly used by developers for its exceptional grasp of software engineering principles and ability to tackle complex programming challenges," said Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief scientist at Anthropic.
"Through GitHub Copilot, Claude will help even more developers throughout the entire development process, from concept to deployment."
GitHub wants to simplify application development
This wasn’t the only major announcement from GitHub last week, either. The firm unveiled a new feature aimed at simplifying application development.
The new GitHub Spark feature uses natural language to build micro apps that can integrate AI features and external data sources without requiring any management of cloud resources.
Developers can start with an initial prompt using both OpenAI and Anthropic models, see live previews of their app as it's built, and automatically save versions of each iteration so they can compare versions as they go.
The new feature also gives developers the option to make changes directly to the underlying code.
"For too long, there has been an unscalable barrier of entry separating a vast majority of the world’s population from building software. This can change with GitHub Spark, our new AI native tool to build applications entirely in natural language," said Dohmke.
"With Spark, we will enable over one billion personal computer and mobile phone users to build and share their own micro apps directly on GitHub—the creator network for the age of AI."
The company also bolstered AI capabilities across its platform with the introduction of multi-file edit for GitHub Copilot in VS Code. This allows Copilot Chat in VS Code to be used to make edits across multiple files at the same time.
GitHub Copilot Extensions, meanwhile, will allow developers to ask questions of any integrated developer tool, including Atlassian Rovo, Docker, Sentry, and Stack Overflow. Users will also be able to build their own private extensions that work with their internal developer tooling.
Similarly, the code completion capabilities of Copilot are now available in public preview for Xcode, for building apps across all Apple platforms.
