Alphabet Inc.’s subsidiary company, Google has announced a partnership with Replit, this partnership will see Google combine its artificial intelligence language models with its software. The partnership between Google and Replit Inc. will help computer programmers write codes, which would compete with similar products produced by Microsoft Corp’s GitHub and OpenAI.
Replit, which boasts of 20 million users, disclosed that its Ghostwriter app will rely on Google’s language-generation AI to enhance its capacity to suggest blocks of code, complete programs and answer questions by developers. Vice President June Yang, at Google Cloud, had refused to disclose the specific language the AI products will use, while he noted that it is a customized combination of systems that will address different tasks like chat and code generation.
Replit CEO, Amjad Masad disclosed in an interview that Replit had built the product with its own AI previously but Google “has much better technology than most people know”. The startup also hopes to expand its use of Google’s cloud services which will help the partnership win over more corporate customers, which is currently not the case as its clients consist of individual developers and startups. Meanwhile, Google will also distribute Replit’s software as part of the partnership agreements.
GitHub, which is solely owned by Microsoft, launched a product last year called Copilot, which suggests blocks of code for software developers, to help speed up the process and automate rote. Copilot has so far attracted 5,000 corporate customers and hundreds of thousands of programmers and is based on Open AI’s language-generating AI. GitHub also shared that it was now adding features that would allow software developers chat options to answer software development questions.
Replit also plans to improve GitHub’s Copilot by providing a better understanding of all the different types of software needed by developers to write code so Ghostwriter “can help you from end-to-end to write the code, write the test, deploy the app, review the app, collaborate with co-workers”. Masad said. “We have huge respect for the guys that worked on Copilot but the way it works, it’s almost that you’re talking to the AI over the phone – you’re shouting your keystrokes and it’s shouting back potential results”
Replit, which was founded by Masad and Haya Odeh, in 2016 has raised more than $100 million, and some of its customers include Stripe Inc and e-commerce platform Shopify Inc. Bloomberg Beta, which is part of Bloomberg LP is an investor in Replit.
Previously consumer and business interest over the last generation of AI has been in ChatGPT and the Dall-E image creation tool, recently interest began to develop around coding applications. GitHub began showing previews of Copilot in 2021 before it became one of the first widely used commercial applications based on Open AI’s GPT-3 system for generating text.
Google Cloud Vice President June Yang said, “Code generation and coding assistance, in general, is very much top of mind for many because there’s a very quick and easy way to be able to quantify the benefits”. While Google also plans to collaborate with other AI coding tools besides Replit, Yang added.
