• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 30, 2023

Google Cloud has partnered with Replit, a software development platform that allows developers to collaborate on writing code, in an effort to accelerate the creation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Under the new partnership, about 20 million Replit developers will gain access to Google Cloud infrastructure, services, and foundation models via Ghostwriter, the company's software development AI. Google Cloud and Workspace developers gain access to Replit's collaborative code editing platform.

Replit’s Ghostwriter application will use Google’s language models to suggest code blocks, complete programs and answer developers’ questions. More than 30% of code written by developers using Ghostwriter is generated by AI, the company said.

The newest large language model (LLM) chat apps can generate code for full programs with simple natural-language prompts, enabling the creation of full websites with no coding experience. And do it in minutes.

Even the most powerful LLMs cannot run code themselves. Stand-alone chat LLMs do not have a project’s context. They require developers to copy and paste code from where they work to the chat app. The models also do not know how to achieve a developer’s goal or run a program within the integrated development environment.

Until LLMs are brought into the integrated development environment (IDE), developers are not yet in the future that Replit CEO Amjad Masad has laid out in the announcement.

Masad said AI will help make non-developers into developers, turning natural language to code. It will turn software engineers to hyper-productive 10X engineers, and help engineers code complex architected software in one-one-thousands of the time.

The move by Google and Replit to empower the next billion software creators comes about one week after Microsoft’s Github announced the launch of Copilot X, an upgraded to its AI-driven software development platform that adopts the latest OpenAI GPT-4 model.

It also expands Copilot’s capabilities, adding chat and voice features and allowing developers to get instant answers to questions about projects, the company said.