Google and Replit Join forces to challenge Microsoft's GitHub in coding tools

On Tuesday, Replit , a cloud software development platform with 20 million users, announced a strategic partnership with Google Cloud . The partnership allows Replit's developers to access Google's infrastructure, services, and foundation models for generative AI. Google Cloud and Workspace developers can also use Replit's collaborative code editing platform to create and share applications online.

This partnership demonstrates Google Cloud's commitment to creating an open ecosystem for AI that can generate code. Replit sees the partnership as the next step in its mission to empower a billion software creators.

This announcement comes just one week after GitHub launched #copilotx, an upgraded version of its AI-driven software development platform that incorporates the latest OpenAI GPT-4 model. Copilot X includes chat and voice features, allowing developers to receive instant answers to project-related questions.

This sets up a competition between 微软 , which owns GitHub and is a strategic investor in OpenAI , and 谷歌 to determine which company can provide the most appealing platform and tools for software developers.

Replit's Ghostwriter application uses Google's language models to suggest code blocks, complete programs, and provide instant answers to developers' questions. The company claims that more than 30% of code generated by developers using Ghostwriter is produced by AI. Advanced language models can even generate entire programs with simple prompts in natural language, allowing complex websites to be created in minutes without coding experience.

However, even the most powerful language models cannot execute code on their own. Stand-alone chatbots lack context about a project and require developers to copy and paste code from the development environment to the chat app, resulting in inefficiencies. These models also do not know how to accomplish a developer's goal or run a program within the integrated development environment.

Until language models are integrated into development environments, Replit's CEO Amjad Masad's vision of using AI to help non-developers become developers, turning software engineers into hyper-productive "10X engineers," and achieving 1,000X productivity for complex software will remain unfulfilled.