- Google’s Gemini Code Assist challenges GitHub’s Copilot with AI-powered code completion.
- It boasts a million-token context window for accurate suggestions and large-scale code changes.
- Google partners with developer-centric companies to enhance Gemini’s knowledge base.
A familiar face, a fresh approach
At its Cloud Next conference, Google introduced Gemini Code Assist, an enterprise-focused AI code completion and assistance tool.
Code Assist is a rebrand and major update of the company’s previous Duet AI service, which became generally available in late 2023.
The new tool, demoed to 30,000 attendees in Las Vegas, will be accessible through plug-ins for popular editors like VS Code and JetBrains.
Gemini’s secret weapon: a million-token context window
Code Assist stands out from its competitors, particularly GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise, by supporting Gemini 1.5 Pro, which boasts a million-token context window—the largest in the industry.
This feature enables more accurate code suggestions and the ability to reason over and change large chunks of code.
Brad Calder, Google’s VP and GM for its cloud platform and technical infrastructure, emphasized the significance of this upgrade, stating that it allows customers to perform large-scale changes across their entire codebase, enabling AI-assisted code transformations that were previously not possible.
Partnering for success
Google is partnering with several developer-centric companies, including Stack Overflow, Datadog, Datastax, Elastic, HashiCorp, Neo4j, Pinecone, Redis, Singlestore, and Snyk, to bring their knowledge bases to Gemini.
The real test for Code Assist will be how developers react to its suggestions and whether it can outperform GitHub’s Copilot, which had a significant head start.
In addition to Code Assist, Google also announced the launch of CodeGemma, a new open model in its Gemma family that was fine-tuned for code generation and assistance, now available through Vertex AI.
