Directly competing with OpenAI for users? Microsoft's GitHub AI assistant introduces Anthropic and Google model selection

Author: Li Dan

Source: Hard AI

OpenAI's "sugar daddy" Microsoft is making the competition faced by OpenAI increasingly fierce, with rivals Anthropic and Google already bringing the battle to GitHub, a software project hosting platform owned by Microsoft.

On Tuesday, October 29th, Eastern Time, GitHub announced in a company blog post that in addition to the current flagship AI model GPT-4o from OpenAI, the platform's AI code assistant GitHub Copilot will also offer several new models for developers to choose from, including OpenAI's o1 preview and the mini version o1-preview, as well as Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

This marks the first time GitHub is allowing users to use models from Anthropic and Google, indicating that GitHub has agreed to integrate the new AI models from Anthropic and Google into its code assistant, which has at least millions of developer users.

For GitHub, this move can strengthen the capabilities of its own AI assistant. For OpenAI, which has been collaborating with GitHub for several years, it directly faces the threat of potentially losing users to other companies, as developers on the GitHub platform can now choose to use models from Anthropic or Google instead of GPT-4o to support GitHub Copilot.

GitHub's CEO Thomas Dohmke stated that GitHub will continue to use OpenAI's models as the default setting, but developers can switch to Google and Anthropic's models as needed. Dohmke explained the significance of GitHub providing new choices as follows:

"We believe the era of a single model has ended."

"No one model fits all scenarios, developers want organizations to build with the model that best suits them. Clearly, the next phase of AI code generation will not only be defined by multiple model capabilities, but also by multiple model choices. Today, we have achieved this."

Dohmke mentioned that over the past month, GitHub has collaborated with the engineering teams of Anthropic and Google on the security, confidentiality, and scalability of their models. GitHub plans to expand the range of optional models in the future, but has not announced any partnerships yet. He also stated that GitHub does not want to overwhelm developers with too many choices.

According to GitHub, the new model choices will first be applied to GitHub Copilot's chat feature, Copilot Chat. OpenAI's o1-preview and o1-mini are already available in Copilot Chat, Claude 3.5 Sonnet will be gradually rolled out next week, and Gemini 1.5 Pro will be launched in the coming weeks Then, the new model will be integrated into the main part of GitHub Copilot. From Copilot Workspace to multi-file editing, code reviews, security auto-fixes, and CLI, many surface areas and features of GitHub Copilot will soon offer multi-model options. Developers will be able to get code output by simply using a few simple prompt words.

GitHub also announced on Tuesday the launch of an AI-native tool called GitHub Spark, which allows developers to build applications completely in natural language, meaning that apps can be created directly using English prompt words instead of programming code. GitHub stated that GitHub Spark is a full-featured micro app that can integrate AI functions and external data sources without managing any cloud resources.

Some media outlets have mentioned that Microsoft has taken some actions this year in collaboration with OpenAI's competitors. For example, in February of this year, Microsoft announced a partnership with early AI model developer Mistral, and in March, Microsoft stated that it was recruiting employees from Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, and his startup company Inflection. The Pi assistant launched by Inflection is a competitor to ChatGPT. In regulatory filings disclosed this summer, Microsoft also listed OpenAI as a competitor.

Some media outlets have pointed out that since acquiring GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has always maintained extensive partnerships for GitHub, even though technically these partners are Microsoft's competitors. GitHub previously provided users with the option of Google and Amazon cloud services. Microsoft also allows its Azure cloud customers to use models other than OpenAI, including Meta and Mistral's models, but does not provide Google and Anthropic's models.

Regarding the news of GitHub providing models other than OpenAI, there are comments on social media X questioning whether Microsoft realizes why the VS Code branch is so interesting, so by providing Anthropic and Google models in GitHub Copilot, it increases the pressure on OpenAI.

Some comments also suggest that this is a wise move, as the advantage of edge application layer companies is that they can freely switch to the latest and best models without any issues