Microsoft's GitHub expands beyond OpenAI, lets developers use AI models from Anthropic, Google
Microsoft has a very expensive and very public relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI. But one of Microsoft's most successful AI products, GitHub Copilot, is now going beyond OpenAI to give developers more choice in what models they want to use.
GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, said in a blog post on Tuesday that developers will be able to power the GitHub Copilot Chat feature with Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model or Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro model, as alternatives to OpenAI's GPT-4o, if they choose.
"There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said in the post. "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."
Microsoft introduced GitHub Copilot in 2021, offering source code suggestions to software developers. Copilot relies on models from OpenAI, which has received billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft and has exploded in popularity since releasing ChatGPT in late 2022.
OpenAI's o1-preview and o1-mini, which are meant to reason over difficult problems, will also be available in the Copilot Chat on GitHub's website and in the open-source Visual Studio Code text editor. They're currently available in a public preview. Google's model will be released in public preview in the next few weeks, a spokesperson said.
The arrival of the o1 models from OpenAI in September led GitHub to look at adding a dropdown menu for Copilot to provide more options, Dohmke said in an interview with CNBC last week. At that point, it felt like "the right time" to add models from Anthropic and