Everything you need to know about GitHub Models, the new AI testing ‘playground’ for developers

GitHub is aiming to make AI models more accessible to developers with the launch of GitHub Models.

The new feature gives free access to AI models including Meta's Llama 3.1, OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, Cohere's Command, and Mistral AI's Mistral Large 2, directly in GitHub.

This, GitHub said, will allow developers to try out and compare the capabilities of the various different models directly within GitHub Codespaces or Visual Studio Code, and then integrate generative AI models into their own applications.

The aim is to make it simpler for developers to explore different AI models in an interactive playground and develop code using their existing GitHub identity.

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"With GitHub Models, more than 100 million developers can now access and experiment with new AI models where their workflow is — directly on GitHub," said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

"From OSS repositories to Copilot Extensions to GitHub Models, it is intentional that we bring as many partners into GitHub as possible. The world’s developers deserve to build with a wide array of world class AI."

How devs can use GitHub Models

Once developers have tried out the different models and like what they see, GitHub has created a 'glide path' to bring the models to their developer environment in Codespaces and VS Code. 

When they're ready to go to production they can access an Azure software development kit (SDK) to connect to Azure AI.

The Azure AI Inference SDK provides client libraries in Python and JavaScript, with support for C# and .NET coming soon. Microsoft said SDK makes it easy to integrate AI into applications by simplifying common tasks related to authentication and security, and retries in a variety of programming languages.

"We’re proud to be an early part of GitHub Models, enabling more developers to interact with and utilize Cohere’s technology through Azure to power and inspire more applications that solve real-world problems," said Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere. "GitHub and Microsoft are key partners to us in bringing AI solutions to all."

GitHub claims that its Copilot is by far the most widely adopted AI-powered developer tool, with more than 77,000 organizations – from BBVA, FedEx, and H&M to Infosys and Paytm – having adopted Copilot in the last two years. It accounted for over 40% of GitHub’s revenue growth this year.

A number of organizations have already been testing GitHub Models.

"As an AI start-up founder and open source maintainer, GitHub Models enables my team to access and experiment with various LLMs in one place," said Anand Chowdhary, co-founder of FirstQuadrant. "This streamlines our development and lowers the entry barrier for building AI apps."

GitHub said that as time goes on, it plans to add more models to its platform.