Google’s new partnership aims to challenge Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot platform

Back in December 2022, Microsoft released the commercial version of its artificial intelligence-powered Copilot platform for developers at $19 per month which leverages open-source code to help developers create quick reference code for a plethora of projects.

Yesterday, Google announced its latest partnership with Replit Inc. to create its own GitHub Copilot-like platform to also deliver AI-infused code to developers.

The details of both Microsoft and Google’s business models are a bit different, but look to deliver similar outputs for developers.

Google and Replit revealed that it will leverage a customized version of Google’s new language-generation AI to power its flagship Ghostwritter app. While a select number of testing consumers are getting their hands on Google’s Bard AI chat bot powered by the company’s newest LLM models, Google’ Cloud vice president June Yang alluded to a more customized language-generation AI for Replit’s purposes that will host a combination of different systems to address a multitude of developer tasks.

Roughly for the past seven years Replit has used its own AI to host its 20 million Ghostwriter customers and more than 240 million projects, but soon it will have the power of Google’s new AI to help win over larger enterprise contracts as Google will also use its own channels to distribute the platform to its partners.

Under the new partnership, Replit developers will get access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, Replit’s software development AI, while Google Cloud and Workspace developers will get access to Replit’s collaborative code editing platform.

Inversely, Microsoft owns GitHub and sought a partnership with OpenAI back in 2020 to create a collaborative AI-led developer platform.

While Microsoft offers commercial Copilot plans for developers at $19 a month to leverage the vast library of GitHub open-source code, it is unclear at this point what how Replit and Google plan to structure their own monetization model around an upgraded Ghostwriter platform.