Thanks to collaboration between Hugging Face and ServiceNow, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for developers is now available, allowing them to perform code writing, suggestion, and generation tasks. Named BigCode, the project offers a top-notch alternative to GitHub Copilot.
StarCoder and StarCoderBase code LLMs are trained on data from GitHub, with over 80 programming languages, Git commits, GitHub issues, and Jupyter notebooks having been used during the process, which took more than six months. Reportedly, it offers better performance than other existing open code LLMs, such as the OpenAI model powering earlier versions of GitHub Copilot, and the context length of over 8,000 tokens allows it to process more code than other such tools.
StarCoder not only provides code writing, suggestion, and generation services to developers, but it can also act as an AI tech assistant, helping out with programming-related questions. An early trial is available on the website HuggingChat, where users can try the model ‘BigCode/StarCoder’ to get a better idea of its features.
BigCode is a project with the aim of responsibly developing LLMs and the core members are Hugging Face and ServiceNow. They invite contributors and AI researchers from all over the world to join and collaborate on the project. Both companies have a strong background in the technology sector, with ServiceNow being a leader in enterprise service management solutions, and Hugging Face specializing in natural language processing research and applications.
