Microsoft does not stop announcing new releases in the field of artificial intelligence. Its alliance with OpenAI has allowed it to get ahead of a Google that in fact created the ‘Transformer’ concept on which generative AIs such as ChatGPT are based. The Mountain View company is shy and its competitor, Google Bard, is more of an experiment than anything else, but be careful, because they are getting their act together.
Ghostwriter vs. GitHub Copilot. Google has partnered with an AI startup called Replit. The result is GhostWriter, a software development platform that directly competes with GitHub Copilot. According to the official announcement, that alliance “will accelerate the creation of generative AI applications.”
Programming with the help of an AI. This platform wants to become an assistant for software development projects from the beginning to the end. You are able to write code, fix it, make suggestions, write unit tests, deploy it, analyze it, and help with collaborations. It promises to be a worthy rival to GitHub Copilot —and the recently released GitHub Copilot X— , and we’ll see if it beats it.
“Google has much better technology than people think”. Replit had created the original product with its AI, but Replit’s CEO, Amjad Masad, explained in an interview with Bloomberg how, thanks to this alliance, they can use Google’s AI resources, which are much more important than we might think. GhostWriter, which had already been released a few months ago, is now super-vitaminated. It competes directly with Copilot and another Amazon solution called CodeWhisperer.
Copilot is like talking on the phone with AI. Masad respected what Copilot had achieved, but said that using it was like “talking to the AI on the phone, yelling at it what you type and it yelling back with potential results.” Ghostwriter’s proposal seems to have an even more integrated relationship with different integrated development environments (IDEs) according to its creators.
We are in a race with Microsoft. The CEO of Replit went further and stated in another interview with Semafor how “there is definitely a race between us and Microsoft. We will be the first. They will probably copy us.” For Replit, the goal is to create a “fully autonomous” AI programmer that you can talk to as if you were a human software engineer. They hope to achieve it in less than a year.
Replit and the data advantage. More than a specific advance in AI, what’s interesting about Replit is that it collects a huge amount of data. The company is used by 20 million programmers who have programmed 240 million programs. Replit offers hosting of this software: its platform is like a virtual machine with everything necessary that allows developers to stop worrying and dedicate themselves to their own. That lets Replit know how they use that platform to train AI models and thus “teach” them how to code.
This is just the beginning: This alliance is just the demonstration that Google is not at all relaxed with the advances we are seeing in other fields. The company owns DeepMind, and yesterday in The Information it was revealed that the company is already collaborating with engineers from the Google Brain AI team “to develop software that competes with OpenAI.”
Google prepares Gemini. That’s the project’s codename, and it could lead to the launch of a new chatbot that might even surpass what Bard has achieved. Those responsible for DeepMind published a study and already launched in September 2022 Sparrow, “a dialogue agent that is useful and reduces the risk of unsafe or inappropriate responses. Our agent is designed to talk to a user, answer questions and search in Internet using Google when it is useful to search for evidence to report on their answers. Or what is the same: a kind of Bing with ChatGPT, but that tries not to hallucinate or make mistakes.
