At its latest developer conference, GitHub unveiled a series of new innovations that emphasize developer choice, control, and ease of use for the AI era. Culminating in three key announcements—the now multi-model GitHub Copilot, the introduction of GitHub Spark, and additional updates across Copilot and GitHub Models—GitHub continues to innovate, motivated by its ambition to reach 1 billion developers.
Each of GitHub’s announcements center AI and the way developers utilize and implement it. Offering greater control, choice, and ease, GitHub stays ahead of the AI curve by addressing the specific needs of its developer community, according to the company.
As part of this effort, GitHub Copilot—the AI coding assistant elevating developer workloads—is now multi-model. Developers can select from a range of industry-leading models—including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini—to meet the needs of their unique use case. Developers can easily toggle between models during a conversation with GitHub Copilot, delivering greater control over how they build—and with what.
"In 2024, we experienced a boom in high-quality large and small language models that each individually excel at different programming tasks. There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them," said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub. "It is clear the next phase of AI code generation will not only be defined by multi-model functionality, but by multi-model choice. Today, we deliver just that."
Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, and Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief scientist at Anthropic, echoed Dohmke’s sentiment about the importance of being able to choose between specific models to meet developer needs.
"Developers want a broad choice of models that are best-suited for development, including code generation, refactoring, and optimizing code," said Kurian. "Gemini models excel at this and are accessible on widely used developer platforms and environments—including now with GitHub Copilot—so millions of developers globally can benefit from trusted, enterprise-grade AI through Google Cloud."
"Claude 3.5 Sonnet excels at coding tasks and is broadly used by developers for its exceptional grasp of software engineering principles and ability to tackle complex programming challenges. We're integrating Claude 3.5 Sonnet with GitHub Copilot today to further our ongoing efforts to put our most advanced AI capabilities directly into developers' hands wherever they're needed and wherever they work," said Kaplan. "Through GitHub Copilot, Claude will help even more developers throughout the entire development process, from concept to deployment."
In addition to GitHub Copilot’s new multi-model functionality, GitHub is debuting GitHub Spark, an AI-powered, natural language-based tool for creating and sharing micro apps—or “sparks”—which can be further customized to meet users’ needs and preferences. Without needing to write or deploy code, GitHub Spark integrates AI features and external data sources without having to manage cloud resources. More experienced developers can configure each sparks’ underlying code, while those less technically inclined can make changes through GitHub Spark’s natural language interface.
“For too long, there has been an unscalable barrier of entry separating a vast majority of the world’s population from building software. This can change with GitHub Spark, our new AI-native tool to build applications entirely in natural language,” said Dohmke. “With Spark, we will enable over one billion personal computer and mobile phone users to build and share their own micro apps directly on GitHub—the creator network for the Age of AI."
GitHub is also announcing a series of updates across GitHub Copilot and the GitHub platform, including multi-file editing, Copilot Extensions, Copilot-powered feedback on code, and various changes to Copilot Workspace.
To learn more about GitHub’s latest innovations, please visit https://github.com/.