Microsoft Strikes Deals With OpenAI’s Top Rivals For AI Coding Assistant
Microsoft is turning up the heat on OpenAI. Microsoft’s developer platform GitHub announced on Tuesday that its wildly popular GitHub Copilot tool—which previously relied entirely on OpenAI models—will now also incorporate AI models from Anthropic and Google.
GitHub Copilot will be able to toggle between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini, the company said. The new development is striking given Microsoft’s long record of relying primarily on OpenAI models for its AI products.
Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI grant it the rights to reuse the startup’s models in its own software, and GitHub Copilot became the earliest Microsoft product built on OpenAI models when it first launched widely in June 2022, months before OpenAI shipped ChatGPT.
That partnership helped OpenAI grab early mindshare with software developers, and was also a boon to Microsoft, which consistently pointed to GitHub Copilot as an early example of revenue coming from a generative AI product (the company implied in July that GitHub Copilot is on track to generate $300 million annually from subscriptions). And because Microsoft already had the rights to use OpenAI’s models, it didn’t have to pay sticker price for the AI underlying the tool, which theoretically helped GitHub’s margins on selling the $10-per-seat software.
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