Google wants to make an AI-powered GitHub competitor

Artificial intelligence-powered (AI) code collaboration platform Replit is partnering with Google Cloud to give it an significant power boost.

Replit is known for its Ghostwriter tool, which allows users to use simple prompts, in the same fashion as Open AI’s ChatGPT and similar AI-powered chat apps, to generate code. Where Ghostwriter differs is that it has access to, and the context of a user’s project to assist with composition.

With the partnership, announced in a blog post, both companies are working towards assisting businesses with accelerating and simplifying development processes to turn “non-developers into developers”, with Google Cloud and Workspace customers gaining access.

AI code collaboration

Though Replit already boasts 20 million users, its partnership with Google comes at an opportune moment. with AI seemingly having broken into the public consciousness following Microsoft Bing’s multi-billion dollar investment into OpenAI, and its implementation of ChatGPT into its search engine.

“Our partnership with Google Cloud on infrastructure and AI is a clear step toward our mission of bringing the next billion software creators online,” said Amjad Masad, Replit’s CEO and Head of Engineering.

“Generative AI can bring significant new capabilities to businesses and developers, including the ability to easily, safely, and scalably create new software applications and online experiences with little or no coding experience,” said June Yang, Google Cloud’s VP for Cloud AI and Industry Solutions.

The rise of no-code tools to write code itself is an enticing idea, but it comes with several problematic caveats, such as issues of ownership, and the fact that authors of similar tools, like Github’s Copilot, have been accused of using open source code to train them. 

•  Here’s our list of the best laptops for programming right now