Hugging Face and ServiceNow release a free code-generating model
Ayush Thakur
Founder @ Reconfigure.in | Gen AI, LLM and Machine Learning | 25+ Research Publications | Patents & 10+ Copyrights Holder | IEEE & Scopus Author | Engineering & Technology Lead
Hugging Face , a leading AI startup that provides natural language processing (NLP) solutions, has teamed up with ServiceNow , a digital workflow company, to create a code-generating AI model similar to GitHub ’s Copilot. The model, called StarCoder, is based on a 30-billion-parameter language model that can generate code snippets from natural language descriptions.
StarCoder is an open-access model that anyone can use for free on Hugging Face’s platform. The model supports over 20 programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, Ruby, and SQL. Users can also fine-tune the model on their own data and share it with the community.
The goal of StarCoder is to help developers save time and effort by automating some of the coding tasks. According to Hugging Face and ServiceNow, StarCoder can generate high-quality code that is syntactically correct and semantically consistent with the user’s intent. The model can also handle complex scenarios such as loops, conditionals, and data structures.
StarCoder is not the first code-generating AI model in the market. GitHub’s Copilot, which was launched in June 2022, is a similar product that uses a 175-billion-parameter language model called Codex, developed by OpenAI . However, Copilot is not open-source and requires a GitHub account to use. Moreover, Copilot has faced some criticism for potentially infringing on the intellectual property rights of developers whose code was used to train the model.
Hugging Face and ServiceNow claim that StarCoder is more responsibly developed and stronger-performing than Copilot. They say that StarCoder was trained on publicly available data sources that respect the licenses of the original code authors. They also say that StarCoder outperforms Copilot on several metrics such as accuracy, diversity, and relevance.
StarCoder is part of Hugging Face’s mission to democratize NLP and make it accessible to everyone. Hugging Face is known for its open-source NLP library Transformers, which has over 15,000 pre-trained models for various NLP tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, question answering, and text generation. Hugging Face also offers a cloud-based platform called Spaces, where users can host and share their NLP applications.
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ServiceNow, on the other hand, is a company that provides cloud-based software solutions for enterprises to manage their workflows and automate their business processes. ServiceNow has been investing in AI and NLP to enhance its products and services. For example, ServiceNow has integrated NLP capabilities into its chatbot platform called Virtual Agent, which can understand natural language queries and provide relevant answers.
The collaboration between Hugging Face and ServiceNow is an example of how AI and NLP can empower developers and improve their productivity. StarCoder is expected to be a useful tool for both novice and experienced programmers who want to leverage the power of AI to generate code faster and easier.
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