Alphabet Inc.’s Google is striking a partnership to combine its artificial intelligence language models with software from startup Replit Inc. that helps computer programmers write code, a bid to compete with a similar product from Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub and OpenAI.
Replit, which has 20 million users, said its Ghostwriter app will rely on Google’s language-generation AI to improve its ability to suggest blocks of code, complete programs and answer developer questions. Google Cloud Vice President June Yang declined to specify which language AI products Replit will use, noting that it’s a customized combination of systems that address different tasks like chat and code-generation.
Previously, Replit built the product with its own AI. Google “has much better technology than most people know,” Replit Chief Executive Officer Amjad Masad said in an interview. The startup will also expand its use of Google’s cloud services and hopes the relationship with the tech giant will help it win over larger corporate customers — right now Replit’s clients are largely individual developers and startups. Google also will distribute Replit’s software as part of the partnership.
GitHub, which is wholly owned by Microsoft, last year released a product called Copilot, which suggests blocks of code as a software developer types, speeding up the process and automating rote or finicky coding tasks. The product, which has attracted 5,000 corporate customers and hundreds of thousands of programmers, is based on OpenAI’s language-generating AI. GitHub last week announced that it’s adding chat capabilities for answering software development questions. Amazon. com Inc.’s cloud-computing unit also sells a product in this category called CodeWhisperer.
The tie-up announced Tuesday is the latest volley in a series of competing AI product releases and improvements from Google, Microsoft and Microsoft-backed OpenAI since the startup gained public attention last year with the wider release of its ChatGPT chatbot.
Replit wants to improve on GitHub’s Copilot by providing a greater understanding of all the different pieces of software a developer uses to write code so Ghostwriter “can help you from end-to-end write the code, write the tests, 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 basically shouting your keystrokes and it’s shouting back potential results,” Masad said.
Founded in 2016 by Masad and Haya Odeh, San Francisco-based Replit has raised more than $100 million and counts electronic payments company Stripe Inc. and e-commerce platform Shopify Inc. among its customers. Bloomberg Beta, part of Bloomberg LP, is an investor in Replit.
While consumer and business fascination over the latest generation of AI has been piqued by ChatGPT and the Dall-E image creation tool, interest in coding applications mounted even earlier. GitHub began showing previews of Copilot in 2021 and it became one of the first widely used commercial applications based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 system for generating text.
“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,” Yang said. Google plans to partner with other AI coding tools besides Replit, she said.
