his Wednesday, GitHub announced that they will make available for all users, a free version of Microsoft Copilot, which is a code completion and an AI
par programming tool. GitHub makes public that this new free version will be delivered by default with the VS Code editor, a popular tool from Microsoft.
It’s true that until now, all users had to be subscribed to GitHub with a monthly payment starting at $10 a month, and only students, teachers, and open-source maintainers were taking advantage of unrestricted AI GitHub Copilot access.
Compared with last year's number of developers was significantly lower than this year, since GitHub announced that it now has about 150 million developers on its GitHub AI platform.
“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019. Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open-source maintainers.”, Thomas Dohmke, the GitHub AI CEO stated in the announcement.
It’s important to know that there are some limitations to the AI Copilot free version. So, all developers who choose to use the free plan will have about 2,000 code completions available every month. Also, many users already know that Microsoft GitHub gives the option for subscribers to choose from various foundation models. But for those who are choosing to use the free version, the platform will restrict access to only Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic and OpenAI’s GPT-4o.
Regarding the Microsoft Copilot Chat, the number of total chat messages is restricted to only 50. It should be mentioned that besides these two restrictions, GitHub AI will offer its users a free and enjoyable experience.
“You log in and you have Copilot free available, and you can start coding with it, which is ultimately the one thing that people are trying to achieve, right? The outcome here is to build something with software and not to try an AI tool for the sake of AI.”, the CEO also states.
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The free GitHub Copilot version is compatible with several editors such as VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, and also GitHub.com.
Even though Microsoft GitHub tried to offer its subscribers various standard tools for AI coding, the industry market has evolved significantly and has been transformed into a very competitive one. Various startups such as Tabrine and Qodo or AWS, are offering similar services for users, and also a free version of the software which pressures Microsoft GitHub to include the distribution of other tools to expand the AI GitHub Copilot popularity.
“With Copilot Free, we are returning to our freemium roots and are laying the groundwork for something far greater: AI represents our best path to enabling a GitHub with one billion developers. There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software,”, as Thomas Dohmke states.
Stay tuned for more updates!
By
George King
•
December 19, 2024 3:10 PM