6 ms·

Next-generation AI models

231 points by BrandonJung 4y ago

carom 4y ago
Very editorialized title.
smcleod 4y ago
Ouch $17 AUD/month for a single user!
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  And for a dead product. These guys need to up their game fast, pivot, or fall off the radar.
- memorable 4y ago
  Copilot beta test version is free! (And 10 times better than Tab9)
  - smcleod 4y ago
    The beta ended today unfortunately, now they want $13AUD/mo.
drcongo 4y ago
I've been using TabNine for years and, at least with Python, the suggestions are superb, and often uncanny - it occasionally suggests the variable name I was thinking of using before it's appeared anywhere in the code. I love TabNine dearly, but the Sublime Text plugin for it has basically been left to rot which is really sad. It doesn't integrate at all well with ST4.
BrandonJung 4y ago
For this specific comparison, it’s essential to start from the technology, as many of the product differences stem from the differences in approach, architecture, and technology choices. Microsoft and OpenAI view AI for software development almost as just another use case for GPT-3, the behemoth language model. Code is text, so they took their language model, fine-tuned it on code, and called the gargantuan 12-billion parameter AI model, Codex. Copilot’s architecture is monolithic: “one model to rule them all.” It is also completely centralized - only Microsoft can train the model, and only Microsoft can host the model due to the enormous amount of computing resources required for training and inference. Tabnine, after comprehensively evaluating models of different sizes, favors individualized language models working in concert. Why? Because code prediction is, in fact, a set of distinct sub-problems which doesn't lend itself to the monolithic model approach. For instance: generating the full code of a function in Python based on name and generating the suffix of a line of code in Rust are two problems Tabnine solves well, but the AI model that best fits every such task is different. We found that a combination of specialized models dramatically increases the precision and length of suggestions for our 1M+ users. A big advantage of Tabnine’s approach is that it can use the right tool for any code prediction task, and for most purposes, our smaller models give great predictions quickly and efficiently. Better yet, most of our models can be run with inexpensive hardware. Now that we understand the principal difference between Microsoft’s huge monolith and Tabnine’s multitude of smaller models, we can explore the differences between the products: First, kind of code suggestions. Copilot queries the model relatively infrequently and suggests a snippet or a full line of code. Copilot does not suggest code in the middle of the line, as its AI model is not best suited for this purpose. Similarly, Tabnine Pro also suggests full snippets or lines of code, but since Tabnine also uses smaller and highly efficient AI models, it queries the model while typing. As a user, it means the AI flows with you, even when you deviate from the code it originally suggested. Second, ability to train the model. Copilot uses one universal AI model, which means that every user is getting the same generic assistance based on an “average of GitHub”, regardless of the project they're working on. Tabnine can train a private AI model on the specific code from customers’ GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket repositories and thus adjust the suggestions to the project-specific code and infrastructure. Training on customer code is possible because Tabnine is modular, enabling the creation of private customized copies. Third, Code security and privacy. There are a few aspects of this. Users cannot train or run the Copilot model. The single model is always hosted by Microsoft. Every Copilot user is sending their code to Microsoft; not some of the code, and not obfuscated - all of it. With Tabnine, users can choose where to run the model: on the Tabnine cloud, locally on the developer machine, or on a self-hosted server. This is possible because Tabnine has AI models that can run efficiently with moderate hardware requirements. In addition, Tabnine makes a firm and unambiguous commitment that no code the user writes is used to train our model. We don’t send to our servers any information about the code that the user writes and the suggestions they’re receiving or accepting. Fourth, commercial terms. Microsoft currently offers Copilot only as a commercial product for developers, without a free plan (beyond a free trial) or organizational purchase. Tabnine has a great free plan and charges for premium features such as longer code completions and private models trained on customers’ code. https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot
- O__________O 4y ago
  Might be worth disclosing you are the “VP (of) Ecosystem and Business Development” for Tabnine in any comments that your pitching Tabnine; while you’re at it, might not hurt to add that to your HN profile.
- desireco42 4y ago
  Thank you for laying out facts for us, at least from Tabnine perspective. I didn't use Tabnine but anecdotally heard it is not as good to guess whole methods the way Copilot is. Now I understand why. The only suggestion I would make, maybe lower the price, MS is bigger player, they pretty much set the standard now, if they have lower price even symbolically, it would hurt you more. I personally am happy with Copilot, had some really wonderful moments and savings in time searching for proper method syntax is where I get a lot of benefit. I should spend time to get to know Tabnine as well so not to be ignorant on this new technology.
  - ImaCake 4y ago
    I noticed there is a free tier for individual users with limited capability. But I agree with the thrust of your argument here.
  - BrandonJung 4y ago
    Good feedback and thank you for taking the time to share
- lolsowrong 4y ago
  https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-can-i-get-access-to-github-copilot-for-free https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...
  - snorremd 4y ago
    To be fair. Tabnine has an actual free plan for personal use. The GitHub Copilot one is only for open source maintainers and educational institutions. All though in the past I found the limited suggestions offered with the Tabnine free plan too limiting to be of much help.
jonahbenton 4y ago
Whenever I encounter tabnine pages in search results- most commonly for Java Spring stuff- and click through, I regret it. The code snippets are never useful and the ads/popups are offensive. Baeldung resources are infinitely better.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  Yeah, I was trying to find a polite way of pointing out that even their screen capture showing how "awesome" the completion is is almost guaranteed to be wrong File fileName = is off to a bad start, but finishing it with File fileName = new File(path); is going to get a finger-wag from me when it makes it to PR because it's a very bad variable name
  - BrandonJung 4y ago
    no need to worry we love good feedback here at Tabnine ;-) Your observations are appreciated. In this case we are using general code and not a custom model but if you would like a custom model then I would wager you would get better variable names... maybe even "awesome". Our goal with our customers is to build models based on the best custom code and input from the best developers so that your new devs can learn from YOUR CODE and with YOUR BEST PRACTICES.
    - claytonjy 4y ago
      When looking across a single companies codebase, how will you distinguish "best practices" from "we know this is bad but it works don't break it"? I have yet to work somewhere where the former is more than 5-10% of the code in production so I worry about this making it harder to raise the bar. I would find it a more compelling pitch to say tabnine will help me and my teammates follow more general best practices, though I understand how subjective that is.
      - BrandonJung 4y ago
        A model is only as god as the code that it trains on and the people it learns from. In your example above we can build a custom model on "best practices" code and not the companies codebase. Our work here has focused on working with ISV's like AWS, GCP, etc as they will have best practices for their tech. We then pull that together for a team in a custom model.
mdaniel 4y ago
For my curiosity, https://www.tabnine.com/code/java/classes/com.google.gson.JsonObject https://www.tabnine.com/code/java/classes/com.google.gson.Js... says it was taken from https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/tree/master/helloworlds/3.8-json/gson/src/main/java/gson/advanced/TreeModel.java#L25 https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/tree/master/hel... which Tabnine annotates as "license: other" (it's actually CC-BY-SA-4.0 <https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/blob/1f4278c9ada5719fd1d945bf882698f97785d017/license.md https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/blob/1f4278c9ad...>) but (a) does Tabnine not know about CC licenses? (b) how is the downstream user (i.e. the person accepting said snippet completion) supposed to interpret "license: other" without doing the same research I just did? That story gets even weirder with the 3rd link on that page whose license is also "other" but this time the "view source" link goes to https://www.tabnine.com/web/assistant/code/rs/5c781237e70f870001961810#L84 https://www.tabnine.com/web/assistant/code/rs/5c781237e70f87... . I find that weird for at least two reasons: (a) it clearly says "This snippet was taken from github" and has a GitHub style "org/repo" nomenclature, but doesn't link to the actual repo (b) at the very top of that file is the boilerplate Apache 2.0 license header Finally, one should be very cautious about ever linking to "master" URLs, since the branch can get nuked if the repo owner decides to go with the "master to main" rename, it can lead the user to a copy of the file that is almost guaranteed not to be the same sha as the one Tabnine indexed, and related to that the repo can undergo a license change (FOSS to BSL is a very common one) leading to some complicated discussions
- lozenge 4y ago
  There's a standard GitHub uses for license files (which must be at the root of the repo) which fills in the "license" field on the right column of the repo. If the standard isn't met then the link just says "View license". I imagine TabNine is pulling the license from the GitHub API. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository#detecting-a-license https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi... https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links When master branch is renamed to main, GitHub redirects any old links. https://github.com/github/renaming#renaming-existing-branches https://github.com/github/renaming#renaming-existing-branche...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
arriu 4y ago
It’s good to see more players in this space.
- charlieyu1 4y ago
  Tabnine was around at least one year longer than Copilot though
  - arriu 4y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I wasn’t aware of it back then unfortunately.
llaolleh 4y ago
Has anyone used both Tabnine and Copilot recently? Would like to know if compares to Copilot now. Last time I checked(end of last year) Tabnine was a far inferior product.
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Just got done using Tabnine for about 2 months a month ago. Switched to Copilot. There's not much comparison.
  - bostonsre 4y ago
    As in copilot is much better than tabnine?
    - artificialLimbs 4y ago
      Yes.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  I switch between both fairly often because I'm interested in how the space is progressing but tabnine has always been my preference. It seems to aim for a bit of a "lower level" than Copilot which is what I'm looking for.
Crazyontap 4y ago
Having just purchased copilot and a user of Tabnine in the past (using Phpstorm) here is my own personal opinion. The suggestions offered by Tabnine weren't anywhere good as copilot - not even by a long shot (at least for PHP and Javascript). But almost an year has passed since I used this so I don't know if they have had a major update and the results are improved, but previously 1 out of 10 tabnine suggestions were barely useful, compared to 9 out of 10 with copilot. Since it's a paid offering now I really hope they've upped their game.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  - davidatbu 4y ago
    I certainly would miss them since they've been contributing massively to the python static typing story ...
  - alar44 4y ago
    No, I don't want to cobble together an office suite, email server, user auth, identity management, file sharing, meeting scheduling, and messaging system from scratch and then train users how to use this Frankenstein system and also support it. Because you know vendors never blame each other.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Listen to how you're talking about it. That's why the need to go. They're poison. They poison everything.
      - alar44 4y ago
        I'm talking about it like someone who has used alternatives and came to like it after many years. It allows me to manage 250 users comfortably with 1 admin in a decently high turnover environment and spend my time actually getting work done rather than fiddling with APIs and random connectors. I don't have to even think about it and it's worth every penny.
codetrotter 4y ago
I use Tabnine completion in JetBrains CLion when I write Rust code. I’ve found it to be quite useful. Haven’t tried GitHub Copilot yet, so don’t know how Copilot compares to it.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  I used Tabnine before GitHub Copilot and I never looked back. It feels a bit like upgrading from GPT2 to GPT3.
  - snorremd 4y ago
    I mean, that's literally what happened. At least initially Tabnine was based on the GPT2 model trained on code. Then GitHub launched Copilot using the OpenAI Codex model which is based on GPT3. I guess this is why several people have commented on the marked improvement when adopting GitHub Copilot. I have no idea how Tabnine builds their models today, and how they perform compared to Copilot. I guess one advantage could be lower latency in suggestions that they claim come from training smaller more specific models. But the way I find Copilot working for me is that it thinks about the same time I need to think and then it makes a suggestion for a good chunk of code. If my thinking and Copilot's thinking match up then I can save myself a good bit of typing.
    - codemanjoe 4y ago
      There's a decent comparison outlining the differences by Tabnine's CEO here (disclaimer - I work there). https://twitter.com/drorwe/status/1539293063117516801 https://twitter.com/drorwe/status/1539293063117516801
thejosh 4y ago
I really want to love Tabine. I really, really do. I gave it a fair chance, let it index my private personal projects, ran it on my personal machine to see how it worked. The results are... not great. I'm using IntelliJ, and Tabnine is arrogant enough to believe that their autocomplete is superior to the libraries autocomplete, even when completely wrong or it has no idea of its autocomplete. These are opensource libraries. Their inline suggestions (per what Github Copilot) isn't great either. I've tried their different strength levels (their UI for their product is fantastic) and it's not great. Github copilot when I first started was pretty good, over the last few months it's become amazing. I'm going to be giving my money to Github over Tabnine, but would prefer to give it to Tabnine.
- nevster 4y ago
  Seconded. Tabnine's suggestions were way worse than IntelliJ's suggestions. It was very annoying. Uninstalled it after a giving it a good try.
  - mistercow 4y ago
    Java was the one language where I found TabNine to fall short. I think it’s a harder case for AI completions, because the existing story for editing Java is a lot less like editing text than other languages. I haven’t tried Copilot for editing Java, because I’m no longer working in any Java code bases, but I wonder if it does a better job.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    Same here. I gave it a go for a while, thinking I must be holding it wrong or something.
  - jollybean 4y ago
    I uninstalled T9 for this reason: bad suggestions superseding the regular autocomplete, this is just not good. I have yet to compare to copilot.
    - bluelightning2k 4y ago
owlbynight 4y ago
I had to uninstall Tabnine because its resource usage was unacceptable. Hopefully they've addressed that, because it was using way too much of my CPU at times that it shouldn't have been.
- bostonsre 4y ago
  I used to have limited memory (8gb for my wsl container) and shit went crazy (had a f_u_tabnine bash function that ran a loop to kill the tab nine procs that had cores pinned) to the point of me giving up ~2 years ago. Now on 16gb memory for a wsl container, I've had no such problems with tabnine. So not clear if there were fixes or if more memory helped.
- YotamShinan 4y ago
  Hi, Tabnine's DevRel here. I'm glad to say that we have addressed this issue: You can now easily opt-in to encrypted cloud mode through the Tabnine hub (find it under Public Model section). This option takes off most of the computing resources used to run Tabnine. That's just one out of many other improvements we've been working on lately, that are now generally available. I hope you'll give it another go! :)
  - saikan 4y ago
    Even after I enabled cloud model just today, the local binaries are still taking a lot of CPU resources in bursts of say once every four seconds, I have the latest versions of both the tabnine extension and vscode.
    - BrandonJung 4y ago
      feel free to turn off local completely. The bursts you are seeing is building a local transformer model on your computer. For enterprises and developers that dont want their data to go anywhere this is critical but does come with tradeoffs. We continue to make this better or feel free to use with GitPod (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/tabnine https://www.gitpod.io/blog/tabnine)
mynegation 4y ago
I remember when Jacob Jackson’s (this kid is nothing less of a genius) tabnine project was posted on HN. Codota then bought tabnine and now they renamed themselves after this acquisition. Got me interested what Jacob is doing now. Looks like after his stint at OpenAI this is his new project: https://same.energy/ https://same.energy/
- viraptor 4y ago
  Thanks for linking it. I love the concept! I was looking for some art for the wall and I can't think of a better way to explore the options when you don't have a specific idea about the result you're after.
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  Jacob Jackson is awesome and we loved the time we got to work with him. Brilliant dude
- kasbah 4y ago
  My experience with Tabnine was that I loved it when it came out. I loved the fact that I could get full line suggestions without any extra language specific setup (I hop around different languages a lot) but the suggestions became less and less useful over time. In my view this was a degradation of Tabnine but of course I have nothing to back this up. Hearing this backstory does reaffirm my suspicion. At some point I started using Language Server (mostly Typescript and Python) suggestions alongside Tabnine and it started to feel like it was just getting in the way. In the end I got rid of Tabnine. I haven't tried Co-Pilot yet but may give it a go when I find some time.
- mantycore 4y ago
chadreem 4y ago
Maybe tabnine changed some things with their new Pro version included multiline completions https://t.co/YGfmAZopwe https://t.co/YGfmAZopwe
Mockapapella 4y ago
Honestly, tab nine is the reason why I didn’t use Copilot for months after I was given initial access — it was just so atrociously bad at what it claimed to help that I was expecting the same from Copilot and thought the concept itself was a broken one. Then out of the blue a coworker mentions he got access to Copilot and loved it, so I gave it a try. Turns out, Copilot just makes things so much easier. I love it. I’m not sure if I’ll pay the subscription right away, but I’m certain I’ll notice the constant annoyance of it missing.
robswc 4y ago
I used the free version of Tabnine and beta tested Copilot. I actually really liked Tabnine but sometimes the tons of suggestions got annoying. I upgraded my IDE and forgot to add copilot but didn't feel like I needed to. Maybe that's a mistake... but sometimes it felt like it was getting in the way and I did encounter a few times it would create "bugs" which I would have to spend time going back and fixing. Not trying to knock these though. They're both very impressive tools.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
atmosx 4y ago
Assume coPilot proposes a function that can be found in 90% of GPLv3 software. Should all software written by coPilot be GPLv3 as well?
- wnkrshm 4y ago
  This is a really good question and is tangent to attribution in art-generating packages as well. It's a part of the process that gets ignored because nobody wants to deal with the unethical implications. If software is doing it, it can't be bad, I guess.
nlh 4y ago
I might be a super weird use case BUT believe it or not I use both Tabnine and Copilot and I kinda like the combo. Here's how it works: I use Copilot for its multi-line code generation. It's vastly superior. (Sorry Tabnine). Gotta give credit to Tabnine for kicking off this space -- they had a multi-year headstart on Copilot and it was pretty cool when it first launched, but it just doesn't come close to Copilot. OpenAI is kicking butt here. Having said that, I still find value out of Tabnine -- I keep it installed it powers the pop-up autocomplete (eg Intellisense replacement). The Tabnine suggestions are immediate (as opposed to Copilot which takes a few seconds), and in a lot of cases it's super helpful for completing a variable name after 1 character, etc. If I ESC out of the Tabnine suggestion, then Copilot takes over and a few seconds later I get a full line/multi-line suggestion. I dunno - it's been working really well for me. Peaceful coexistence :)
- skohan 4y ago
  Call me old fashioned, but I use my brain for mutli-line code generation
  - swah 4y ago
    I used to use that, but Copilot works better with multiple languages! ...just kinda joking: for me, one major use case of this thing is a faster alternative to googling some syntax or method name.
  - torginus 4y ago
    I feel Copilot indispensable - with the constant emergence of frameworks, languages I need to keep learning, it really shortens the time it takes to get productive in an unfamiliar environment.
    - skohan 4y ago
      It's existed for less than a year and you find it indispensable?
      - 4y ago
KrishnaShripad 4y ago
The problem I had with Tabnine was insane memory consumption to the point where my Mac crawled to a halt. I had to keep killing Tabnine process or just uninstall the plugin. Copilot has been a breeze. I really want to give Tabnine a shot again but I doubt if they can get it to perform as well as Copilot does.
- YotamShinan 4y ago
  Hi there, Tabnine's DevRel here. While Copilot serves its code completions through a monolith model, too big to be processed locally (and therefore your code goes into MSFT servers by default), Tabnine's approach is keeping the code it helps writing - private and secured. The way it's done is by using 12 standalone models, which can run locally (but then it'll sometimes consume excessive computing power) OR in encrypted cloud mode, which takes off most of these memory and CPU/GPU resources. You can easily configure the mode you wish to work with through the Tabnine Hub (find the toggle radio button under "Public Model"). I don't when was the last time you've tried coding with Tabnine in the background, but I sure hope that now, with the release of our next-generation abilities you'll give it another go :)
qyron 4y ago
I consider myself pretty advanced user of Tabnine, having purchased the first version from Jacob just when it appeared. I haven't used (and don't plan to) its full-function code completion and only briefly evaluated Copilot. Some thoughts: - Tabnine's local per-repository model shines best when used on big monolithic repos with lots of similar or boilerplate code. By learning on the same code it's used for it IMO does much better job at detecting local patterns. Also local-model means pretty "safe" from security POV for corporate use (I can't imagine big corps like Google and Amazon allowing use of Copilot for proprietary code). - Back in they free tier of Tabnine was pretty useless compared to Pro because it severely limited model size. If it's still the case now I hope they have a long evaluation period. - From usability POV, unfortunately it doesn't provide non-intrusive experience out of the box, which is very annoying and I believe is a reason for many users abandoning it pretty quickly. I had to modify both VSCode extension and VSCode itself (!) so that Tabnine's completion suggestions won't interfere with others.
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  Appreciate the feedback and looks like you are clearly in the developer group that wants very fast small useful completions. Can you share the modifications that you made and perhaps a few more details on what they were?
  - qyron 4y ago
    Both are related to limitations of vscode completion engine, so Tabnine can't really blamed for them in any way. 1. Initially Tabnine's auto-completion was triggered on any character, which best leveraged Tabnine's power but also had inherent problem: when Tabnine was triggered on non-letter character it sometimes prevented Vscode from showing suggestions from other completion sources (LSPs, snippets). There is a discussion in https://github.com/codota/tabnine-vscode/issues/6 https://github.com/codota/tabnine-vscode/issues/6 with me explaining that the only viable solution is to reduce set of trigger characters to letters only. In the end a fix was pushed that reduced the set of trigger characters, which made the problem less likely but still not solved. The are numerous duplicates of this issue on Github. 2. Another problem is when Vscode has auto-completion suggestions from Tabnine and other sources (LSP, snippets), it frequently puts Tabnine's at the top of list. This is a big no-go for me because most of the time just want to complete the identifier (class field, method etc.). Modifying just the extension code didn't help so in the end I had add a small patch to Vscode itself, which gives lowest score to Tabnine's candidates: https://github.com/sergei-dyshel/vscode/commit/ee73034b9ec6c9fad0d856c34658a505e4c2f692 https://github.com/sergei-dyshel/vscode/commit/ee73034b9ec6c.... I must admit that both problems can be practically solved by new "inline auto-completion" mechanism in vscode which looks very promising for AI-based completion in general. I'm looking forward to evaluate it.
daef 4y ago
Tabnine and Copilot feel like the endboss for various plagiarism checkers. I'm curious how universities will adapt to this.
- rane 4y ago
  How have universities adapted to copy-pasting code off of StackOverflow?
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Or rewriting code from books?
bluelightning2k 4y ago
I feel for TabNine. What they're doing is impactful, impressive - and so eclipsed by an unreasonably well-resourced competitor that they don't even get given much credit. "Not as good as CoPilot" really doesn't say enough about something that's still very impressive. Personally I thought it was cool but not game-changing, and moved on when I got into CoPilot. I can't comment on the next-gen models.
- droid_w 4y ago
- superasn 4y ago
  I think it's mostly about having deeper pockets than being clever or original when it comes to A.I. (though these guys just got $15m fwiw). But this is one thing that worries me about A.I speaking as an indiehacker. Being scrappy won't soon cut it anymore. Right now you can bootstrap a solid product for $15K, at least a MVP. Soon with the amount of GPU and other resources required to train these models you'll need a min $1M budget and no amount of jugaad will be able to cut it.
  - BrandonJung 4y ago
    Cost wise the biggest spend is building the large model (CODEX for Copilot). While CODEX is close sourced there are a number of other good open source transformer models from SFDC (T5), AI21, Meta that are the foundational models we use. Going forward we will continue to partner with the community to enable these large models to reach developers in code-time.
    - superasn 4y ago
      Just out of curiosity since you are so knowledgeable in this area.. what would be like a very approx ballpark figure to develop something like codex?
      - BrandonJung 4y ago
nakovet 4y ago
I used TabNine for years, if I recall correctly it was developed by a Waterloo (Ontario - Canada) student and bought by an Israeli company. Once they changed their EULA my security aware company was like can't use that anymore. I provided that feedback to them but I guess I was the only one raising eyebrows. My suggestion is just lower your price to match Copilot, so it's easy on the user deciding between both of you, I am for one sold on how useful Copilot is.
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  Would you be willing to share your concerns about the EULA? The pricing question is something we are currently discussing as you can imagine. It is surprising that our EULA was a problem but GitHub's was ok given they collect your information for training.
ascar 4y ago
What's up with this? The title is editorialized as advertisement against a competing product and the content of the link is essentially advertisement too. It was posted by the VP of Business Development of Tabnine. Is this really organically ending up on the front page or are some bot/vote rings in control? @dang shouldn't the title at least be changed to "Announcing our Next-generation AI models"?
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  my guess given that I do not have significant karma points is that this is a subject that millions of devs are trying to understand more deeply (a million plus for both Tabnine and Copilot). There are two competitors with significantly different takes on how we solve this problem both technically and securely.
JCWasmx86 4y ago
This is really interesting, $12 a month are a good price IMO. Is it possible to use TabNine without using the random executable from https://update.tabnine.com/3.2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/TabNine https://update.tabnine.com/3.2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/... (Or is there the source available?) Are there any instructions on to make it work with any other editor (GNOME-Builder in my case)? Is there Vala support? Edit: Found this: https://github.com/codota/TabNine/blob/master/HowToWriteAClient.md https://github.com/codota/TabNine/blob/master/HowToWriteACli...
joelthelion 4y ago
Can we hope for a local, open-source version of these models some day?
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  it is a question we are always asking but not sure what people would do if they were open-sourced. Did you have a specific use case in mind?
mellosouls 4y ago
"Understanding AI for coders..." For any coders who might think this article will help them understand AI, the actual title is: Announcing our Next-generation AI models Perhaps it has changed since being posted but it's just a plug.

231 points by BrandonJung 4y ago

carom 4y ago

Very editorialized title.

smcleod 4y ago

Ouch $17 AUD/month for a single user!

eurasiantiger 4y ago
And for a dead product. These guys need to up their game fast, pivot, or fall off the radar.
memorable 4y ago
Copilot beta test version is free! (And 10 times better than Tab9)
- smcleod 4y ago
  The beta ended today unfortunately, now they want $13AUD/mo.

drcongo 4y ago

I've been using TabNine for years and, at least with Python, the suggestions are superb, and often uncanny - it occasionally suggests the variable name I was thinking of using before it's appeared anywhere in the code. I love TabNine dearly, but the Sublime Text plugin for it has basically been left to rot which is really sad. It doesn't integrate at all well with ST4.

BrandonJung 4y ago

For this specific comparison, it’s essential to start from the technology, as many of the product differences stem from the differences in approach, architecture, and technology choices. Microsoft and OpenAI view AI for software development almost as just another use case for GPT-3, the behemoth language model. Code is text, so they took their language model, fine-tuned it on code, and called the gargantuan 12-billion parameter AI model, Codex. Copilot’s architecture is monolithic: “one model to rule them all.” It is also completely centralized - only Microsoft can train the model, and only Microsoft can host the model due to the enormous amount of computing resources required for training and inference. Tabnine, after comprehensively evaluating models of different sizes, favors individualized language models working in concert. Why? Because code prediction is, in fact, a set of distinct sub-problems which doesn't lend itself to the monolithic model approach. For instance: generating the full code of a function in Python based on name and generating the suffix of a line of code in Rust are two problems Tabnine solves well, but the AI model that best fits every such task is different. We found that a combination of specialized models dramatically increases the precision and length of suggestions for our 1M+ users. A big advantage of Tabnine’s approach is that it can use the right tool for any code prediction task, and for most purposes, our smaller models give great predictions quickly and efficiently. Better yet, most of our models can be run with inexpensive hardware. Now that we understand the principal difference between Microsoft’s huge monolith and Tabnine’s multitude of smaller models, we can explore the differences between the products: First, kind of code suggestions. Copilot queries the model relatively infrequently and suggests a snippet or a full line of code. Copilot does not suggest code in the middle of the line, as its AI model is not best suited for this purpose. Similarly, Tabnine Pro also suggests full snippets or lines of code, but since Tabnine also uses smaller and highly efficient AI models, it queries the model while typing. As a user, it means the AI flows with you, even when you deviate from the code it originally suggested. Second, ability to train the model. Copilot uses one universal AI model, which means that every user is getting the same generic assistance based on an “average of GitHub”, regardless of the project they're working on. Tabnine can train a private AI model on the specific code from customers’ GitLab/GitHub/BitBucket repositories and thus adjust the suggestions to the project-specific code and infrastructure. Training on customer code is possible because Tabnine is modular, enabling the creation of private customized copies. Third, Code security and privacy. There are a few aspects of this. Users cannot train or run the Copilot model. The single model is always hosted by Microsoft. Every Copilot user is sending their code to Microsoft; not some of the code, and not obfuscated - all of it. With Tabnine, users can choose where to run the model: on the Tabnine cloud, locally on the developer machine, or on a self-hosted server. This is possible because Tabnine has AI models that can run efficiently with moderate hardware requirements. In addition, Tabnine makes a firm and unambiguous commitment that no code the user writes is used to train our model. We don’t send to our servers any information about the code that the user writes and the suggestions they’re receiving or accepting. Fourth, commercial terms. Microsoft currently offers Copilot only as a commercial product for developers, without a free plan (beyond a free trial) or organizational purchase. Tabnine has a great free plan and charges for premium features such as longer code completions and private models trained on customers’ code. https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot https://tabnine.com/tabnine-vs-github-copilot

O__________O 4y ago
Might be worth disclosing you are the “VP (of) Ecosystem and Business Development” for Tabnine in any comments that your pitching Tabnine; while you’re at it, might not hurt to add that to your HN profile.
desireco42 4y ago
Thank you for laying out facts for us, at least from Tabnine perspective. I didn't use Tabnine but anecdotally heard it is not as good to guess whole methods the way Copilot is. Now I understand why. The only suggestion I would make, maybe lower the price, MS is bigger player, they pretty much set the standard now, if they have lower price even symbolically, it would hurt you more. I personally am happy with Copilot, had some really wonderful moments and savings in time searching for proper method syntax is where I get a lot of benefit. I should spend time to get to know Tabnine as well so not to be ignorant on this new technology.
- ImaCake 4y ago
  I noticed there is a free tier for individual users with limited capability. But I agree with the thrust of your argument here.
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  Good feedback and thank you for taking the time to share
lolsowrong 4y ago
https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-can-i-get-access-to-github-copilot-for-free https://github.com/pricing#i-work-on-open-source-projects-ca...
- snorremd 4y ago
  To be fair. Tabnine has an actual free plan for personal use. The GitHub Copilot one is only for open source maintainers and educational institutions. All though in the past I found the limited suggestions offered with the Tabnine free plan too limiting to be of much help.

jonahbenton 4y ago

Whenever I encounter tabnine pages in search results- most commonly for Java Spring stuff- and click through, I regret it. The code snippets are never useful and the ads/popups are offensive. Baeldung resources are infinitely better.

mdaniel 4y ago
Yeah, I was trying to find a polite way of pointing out that even their screen capture showing how "awesome" the completion is is almost guaranteed to be wrong File fileName = is off to a bad start, but finishing it with File fileName = new File(path); is going to get a finger-wag from me when it makes it to PR because it's a very bad variable name
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  no need to worry we love good feedback here at Tabnine ;-) Your observations are appreciated. In this case we are using general code and not a custom model but if you would like a custom model then I would wager you would get better variable names... maybe even "awesome". Our goal with our customers is to build models based on the best custom code and input from the best developers so that your new devs can learn from YOUR CODE and with YOUR BEST PRACTICES.
  - claytonjy 4y ago
    When looking across a single companies codebase, how will you distinguish "best practices" from "we know this is bad but it works don't break it"? I have yet to work somewhere where the former is more than 5-10% of the code in production so I worry about this making it harder to raise the bar. I would find it a more compelling pitch to say tabnine will help me and my teammates follow more general best practices, though I understand how subjective that is.
    - BrandonJung 4y ago
      A model is only as god as the code that it trains on and the people it learns from. In your example above we can build a custom model on "best practices" code and not the companies codebase. Our work here has focused on working with ISV's like AWS, GCP, etc as they will have best practices for their tech. We then pull that together for a team in a custom model.

mdaniel 4y ago

For my curiosity, https://www.tabnine.com/code/java/classes/com.google.gson.JsonObject https://www.tabnine.com/code/java/classes/com.google.gson.Js... says it was taken from https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/tree/master/helloworlds/3.8-json/gson/src/main/java/gson/advanced/TreeModel.java#L25 https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/tree/master/hel... which Tabnine annotates as "license: other" (it's actually CC-BY-SA-4.0 <https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/blob/1f4278c9ada5719fd1d945bf882698f97785d017/license.md https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links/blob/1f4278c9ad...>) but (a) does Tabnine not know about CC licenses? (b) how is the downstream user (i.e. the person accepting said snippet completion) supposed to interpret "license: other" without doing the same research I just did? That story gets even weirder with the 3rd link on that page whose license is also "other" but this time the "view source" link goes to https://www.tabnine.com/web/assistant/code/rs/5c781237e70f870001961810#L84 https://www.tabnine.com/web/assistant/code/rs/5c781237e70f87... . I find that weird for at least two reasons: (a) it clearly says "This snippet was taken from github" and has a GitHub style "org/repo" nomenclature, but doesn't link to the actual repo (b) at the very top of that file is the boilerplate Apache 2.0 license header Finally, one should be very cautious about ever linking to "master" URLs, since the branch can get nuked if the repo owner decides to go with the "master to main" rename, it can lead the user to a copy of the file that is almost guaranteed not to be the same sha as the one Tabnine indexed, and related to that the repo can undergo a license change (FOSS to BSL is a very common one) leading to some complicated discussions

lozenge 4y ago
There's a standard GitHub uses for license files (which must be at the root of the repo) which fills in the "license" field on the right column of the repo. If the standard isn't met then the link just says "View license". I imagine TabNine is pulling the license from the GitHub API. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository#detecting-a-license https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-reposi... https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links https://github.com/Vedenin/useful-java-links When master branch is renamed to main, GitHub redirects any old links. https://github.com/github/renaming#renaming-existing-branches https://github.com/github/renaming#renaming-existing-branche...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

arriu 4y ago

It’s good to see more players in this space.

charlieyu1 4y ago
Tabnine was around at least one year longer than Copilot though
- arriu 4y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I wasn’t aware of it back then unfortunately.

llaolleh 4y ago

Has anyone used both Tabnine and Copilot recently? Would like to know if compares to Copilot now. Last time I checked(end of last year) Tabnine was a far inferior product.

artificialLimbs 4y ago
Just got done using Tabnine for about 2 months a month ago. Switched to Copilot. There's not much comparison.
- bostonsre 4y ago
  As in copilot is much better than tabnine?
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    Yes.
tylersmith 4y ago
I switch between both fairly often because I'm interested in how the space is progressing but tabnine has always been my preference. It seems to aim for a bit of a "lower level" than Copilot which is what I'm looking for.

Crazyontap 4y ago

Having just purchased copilot and a user of Tabnine in the past (using Phpstorm) here is my own personal opinion. The suggestions offered by Tabnine weren't anywhere good as copilot - not even by a long shot (at least for PHP and Javascript). But almost an year has passed since I used this so I don't know if they have had a major update and the results are improved, but previously 1 out of 10 tabnine suggestions were barely useful, compared to 9 out of 10 with copilot. Since it's a paid offering now I really hope they've upped their game.

fartcannon 4y ago
- davidatbu 4y ago
  I certainly would miss them since they've been contributing massively to the python static typing story ...
- alar44 4y ago
  No, I don't want to cobble together an office suite, email server, user auth, identity management, file sharing, meeting scheduling, and messaging system from scratch and then train users how to use this Frankenstein system and also support it. Because you know vendors never blame each other.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Listen to how you're talking about it. That's why the need to go. They're poison. They poison everything.
    - alar44 4y ago
      I'm talking about it like someone who has used alternatives and came to like it after many years. It allows me to manage 250 users comfortably with 1 admin in a decently high turnover environment and spend my time actually getting work done rather than fiddling with APIs and random connectors. I don't have to even think about it and it's worth every penny.

codetrotter 4y ago

I use Tabnine completion in JetBrains CLion when I write Rust code. I’ve found it to be quite useful. Haven’t tried GitHub Copilot yet, so don’t know how Copilot compares to it.

speedgoose 4y ago
I used Tabnine before GitHub Copilot and I never looked back. It feels a bit like upgrading from GPT2 to GPT3.
- snorremd 4y ago
  I mean, that's literally what happened. At least initially Tabnine was based on the GPT2 model trained on code. Then GitHub launched Copilot using the OpenAI Codex model which is based on GPT3. I guess this is why several people have commented on the marked improvement when adopting GitHub Copilot. I have no idea how Tabnine builds their models today, and how they perform compared to Copilot. I guess one advantage could be lower latency in suggestions that they claim come from training smaller more specific models. But the way I find Copilot working for me is that it thinks about the same time I need to think and then it makes a suggestion for a good chunk of code. If my thinking and Copilot's thinking match up then I can save myself a good bit of typing.
  - codemanjoe 4y ago
    There's a decent comparison outlining the differences by Tabnine's CEO here (disclaimer - I work there). https://twitter.com/drorwe/status/1539293063117516801 https://twitter.com/drorwe/status/1539293063117516801

thejosh 4y ago

I really want to love Tabine. I really, really do. I gave it a fair chance, let it index my private personal projects, ran it on my personal machine to see how it worked. The results are... not great. I'm using IntelliJ, and Tabnine is arrogant enough to believe that their autocomplete is superior to the libraries autocomplete, even when completely wrong or it has no idea of its autocomplete. These are opensource libraries. Their inline suggestions (per what Github Copilot) isn't great either. I've tried their different strength levels (their UI for their product is fantastic) and it's not great. Github copilot when I first started was pretty good, over the last few months it's become amazing. I'm going to be giving my money to Github over Tabnine, but would prefer to give it to Tabnine.

nevster 4y ago
Seconded. Tabnine's suggestions were way worse than IntelliJ's suggestions. It was very annoying. Uninstalled it after a giving it a good try.
- mistercow 4y ago
  Java was the one language where I found TabNine to fall short. I think it’s a harder case for AI completions, because the existing story for editing Java is a lot less like editing text than other languages. I haven’t tried Copilot for editing Java, because I’m no longer working in any Java code bases, but I wonder if it does a better job.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  Same here. I gave it a go for a while, thinking I must be holding it wrong or something.
- jollybean 4y ago
  I uninstalled T9 for this reason: bad suggestions superseding the regular autocomplete, this is just not good. I have yet to compare to copilot.
  - bluelightning2k 4y ago

owlbynight 4y ago

I had to uninstall Tabnine because its resource usage was unacceptable. Hopefully they've addressed that, because it was using way too much of my CPU at times that it shouldn't have been.

bostonsre 4y ago
I used to have limited memory (8gb for my wsl container) and shit went crazy (had a f_u_tabnine bash function that ran a loop to kill the tab nine procs that had cores pinned) to the point of me giving up ~2 years ago. Now on 16gb memory for a wsl container, I've had no such problems with tabnine. So not clear if there were fixes or if more memory helped.
YotamShinan 4y ago
Hi, Tabnine's DevRel here. I'm glad to say that we have addressed this issue: You can now easily opt-in to encrypted cloud mode through the Tabnine hub (find it under Public Model section). This option takes off most of the computing resources used to run Tabnine. That's just one out of many other improvements we've been working on lately, that are now generally available. I hope you'll give it another go! :)
- saikan 4y ago
  Even after I enabled cloud model just today, the local binaries are still taking a lot of CPU resources in bursts of say once every four seconds, I have the latest versions of both the tabnine extension and vscode.
  - BrandonJung 4y ago
    feel free to turn off local completely. The bursts you are seeing is building a local transformer model on your computer. For enterprises and developers that dont want their data to go anywhere this is critical but does come with tradeoffs. We continue to make this better or feel free to use with GitPod (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/tabnine https://www.gitpod.io/blog/tabnine)

mynegation 4y ago

I remember when Jacob Jackson’s (this kid is nothing less of a genius) tabnine project was posted on HN. Codota then bought tabnine and now they renamed themselves after this acquisition. Got me interested what Jacob is doing now. Looks like after his stint at OpenAI this is his new project: https://same.energy/ https://same.energy/

viraptor 4y ago
Thanks for linking it. I love the concept! I was looking for some art for the wall and I can't think of a better way to explore the options when you don't have a specific idea about the result you're after.
BrandonJung 4y ago
Jacob Jackson is awesome and we loved the time we got to work with him. Brilliant dude
kasbah 4y ago
My experience with Tabnine was that I loved it when it came out. I loved the fact that I could get full line suggestions without any extra language specific setup (I hop around different languages a lot) but the suggestions became less and less useful over time. In my view this was a degradation of Tabnine but of course I have nothing to back this up. Hearing this backstory does reaffirm my suspicion. At some point I started using Language Server (mostly Typescript and Python) suggestions alongside Tabnine and it started to feel like it was just getting in the way. In the end I got rid of Tabnine. I haven't tried Co-Pilot yet but may give it a go when I find some time.
mantycore 4y ago

chadreem 4y ago

Maybe tabnine changed some things with their new Pro version included multiline completions https://t.co/YGfmAZopwe https://t.co/YGfmAZopwe

Mockapapella 4y ago

Honestly, tab nine is the reason why I didn’t use Copilot for months after I was given initial access — it was just so atrociously bad at what it claimed to help that I was expecting the same from Copilot and thought the concept itself was a broken one. Then out of the blue a coworker mentions he got access to Copilot and loved it, so I gave it a try. Turns out, Copilot just makes things so much easier. I love it. I’m not sure if I’ll pay the subscription right away, but I’m certain I’ll notice the constant annoyance of it missing.

robswc 4y ago

I used the free version of Tabnine and beta tested Copilot. I actually really liked Tabnine but sometimes the tons of suggestions got annoying. I upgraded my IDE and forgot to add copilot but didn't feel like I needed to. Maybe that's a mistake... but sometimes it felt like it was getting in the way and I did encounter a few times it would create "bugs" which I would have to spend time going back and fixing. Not trying to knock these though. They're both very impressive tools.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

atmosx 4y ago

Assume coPilot proposes a function that can be found in 90% of GPLv3 software. Should all software written by coPilot be GPLv3 as well?

wnkrshm 4y ago
This is a really good question and is tangent to attribution in art-generating packages as well. It's a part of the process that gets ignored because nobody wants to deal with the unethical implications. If software is doing it, it can't be bad, I guess.

nlh 4y ago

I might be a super weird use case BUT believe it or not I use both Tabnine and Copilot and I kinda like the combo. Here's how it works: I use Copilot for its multi-line code generation. It's vastly superior. (Sorry Tabnine). Gotta give credit to Tabnine for kicking off this space -- they had a multi-year headstart on Copilot and it was pretty cool when it first launched, but it just doesn't come close to Copilot. OpenAI is kicking butt here. Having said that, I still find value out of Tabnine -- I keep it installed it powers the pop-up autocomplete (eg Intellisense replacement). The Tabnine suggestions are immediate (as opposed to Copilot which takes a few seconds), and in a lot of cases it's super helpful for completing a variable name after 1 character, etc. If I ESC out of the Tabnine suggestion, then Copilot takes over and a few seconds later I get a full line/multi-line suggestion. I dunno - it's been working really well for me. Peaceful coexistence :)

skohan 4y ago
Call me old fashioned, but I use my brain for mutli-line code generation
- swah 4y ago
  I used to use that, but Copilot works better with multiple languages! ...just kinda joking: for me, one major use case of this thing is a faster alternative to googling some syntax or method name.
- torginus 4y ago
  I feel Copilot indispensable - with the constant emergence of frameworks, languages I need to keep learning, it really shortens the time it takes to get productive in an unfamiliar environment.
  - skohan 4y ago
    It's existed for less than a year and you find it indispensable?
    - 4y ago

KrishnaShripad 4y ago

The problem I had with Tabnine was insane memory consumption to the point where my Mac crawled to a halt. I had to keep killing Tabnine process or just uninstall the plugin. Copilot has been a breeze. I really want to give Tabnine a shot again but I doubt if they can get it to perform as well as Copilot does.

YotamShinan 4y ago
Hi there, Tabnine's DevRel here. While Copilot serves its code completions through a monolith model, too big to be processed locally (and therefore your code goes into MSFT servers by default), Tabnine's approach is keeping the code it helps writing - private and secured. The way it's done is by using 12 standalone models, which can run locally (but then it'll sometimes consume excessive computing power) OR in encrypted cloud mode, which takes off most of these memory and CPU/GPU resources. You can easily configure the mode you wish to work with through the Tabnine Hub (find the toggle radio button under "Public Model"). I don't when was the last time you've tried coding with Tabnine in the background, but I sure hope that now, with the release of our next-generation abilities you'll give it another go :)

qyron 4y ago

I consider myself pretty advanced user of Tabnine, having purchased the first version from Jacob just when it appeared. I haven't used (and don't plan to) its full-function code completion and only briefly evaluated Copilot. Some thoughts: - Tabnine's local per-repository model shines best when used on big monolithic repos with lots of similar or boilerplate code. By learning on the same code it's used for it IMO does much better job at detecting local patterns. Also local-model means pretty "safe" from security POV for corporate use (I can't imagine big corps like Google and Amazon allowing use of Copilot for proprietary code). - Back in they free tier of Tabnine was pretty useless compared to Pro because it severely limited model size. If it's still the case now I hope they have a long evaluation period. - From usability POV, unfortunately it doesn't provide non-intrusive experience out of the box, which is very annoying and I believe is a reason for many users abandoning it pretty quickly. I had to modify both VSCode extension and VSCode itself (!) so that Tabnine's completion suggestions won't interfere with others.

BrandonJung 4y ago
Appreciate the feedback and looks like you are clearly in the developer group that wants very fast small useful completions. Can you share the modifications that you made and perhaps a few more details on what they were?
- qyron 4y ago
  Both are related to limitations of vscode completion engine, so Tabnine can't really blamed for them in any way. 1. Initially Tabnine's auto-completion was triggered on any character, which best leveraged Tabnine's power but also had inherent problem: when Tabnine was triggered on non-letter character it sometimes prevented Vscode from showing suggestions from other completion sources (LSPs, snippets). There is a discussion in https://github.com/codota/tabnine-vscode/issues/6 https://github.com/codota/tabnine-vscode/issues/6 with me explaining that the only viable solution is to reduce set of trigger characters to letters only. In the end a fix was pushed that reduced the set of trigger characters, which made the problem less likely but still not solved. The are numerous duplicates of this issue on Github. 2. Another problem is when Vscode has auto-completion suggestions from Tabnine and other sources (LSP, snippets), it frequently puts Tabnine's at the top of list. This is a big no-go for me because most of the time just want to complete the identifier (class field, method etc.). Modifying just the extension code didn't help so in the end I had add a small patch to Vscode itself, which gives lowest score to Tabnine's candidates: https://github.com/sergei-dyshel/vscode/commit/ee73034b9ec6c9fad0d856c34658a505e4c2f692 https://github.com/sergei-dyshel/vscode/commit/ee73034b9ec6c.... I must admit that both problems can be practically solved by new "inline auto-completion" mechanism in vscode which looks very promising for AI-based completion in general. I'm looking forward to evaluate it.

daef 4y ago

Tabnine and Copilot feel like the endboss for various plagiarism checkers. I'm curious how universities will adapt to this.

rane 4y ago
How have universities adapted to copy-pasting code off of StackOverflow?
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Or rewriting code from books?

bluelightning2k 4y ago

I feel for TabNine. What they're doing is impactful, impressive - and so eclipsed by an unreasonably well-resourced competitor that they don't even get given much credit. "Not as good as CoPilot" really doesn't say enough about something that's still very impressive. Personally I thought it was cool but not game-changing, and moved on when I got into CoPilot. I can't comment on the next-gen models.

droid_w 4y ago
superasn 4y ago
I think it's mostly about having deeper pockets than being clever or original when it comes to A.I. (though these guys just got $15m fwiw). But this is one thing that worries me about A.I speaking as an indiehacker. Being scrappy won't soon cut it anymore. Right now you can bootstrap a solid product for $15K, at least a MVP. Soon with the amount of GPU and other resources required to train these models you'll need a min $1M budget and no amount of jugaad will be able to cut it.
- BrandonJung 4y ago
  Cost wise the biggest spend is building the large model (CODEX for Copilot). While CODEX is close sourced there are a number of other good open source transformer models from SFDC (T5), AI21, Meta that are the foundational models we use. Going forward we will continue to partner with the community to enable these large models to reach developers in code-time.
  - superasn 4y ago
    Just out of curiosity since you are so knowledgeable in this area.. what would be like a very approx ballpark figure to develop something like codex?
    - BrandonJung 4y ago

nakovet 4y ago

I used TabNine for years, if I recall correctly it was developed by a Waterloo (Ontario - Canada) student and bought by an Israeli company. Once they changed their EULA my security aware company was like can't use that anymore. I provided that feedback to them but I guess I was the only one raising eyebrows. My suggestion is just lower your price to match Copilot, so it's easy on the user deciding between both of you, I am for one sold on how useful Copilot is.

BrandonJung 4y ago
Would you be willing to share your concerns about the EULA? The pricing question is something we are currently discussing as you can imagine. It is surprising that our EULA was a problem but GitHub's was ok given they collect your information for training.

ascar 4y ago

What's up with this? The title is editorialized as advertisement against a competing product and the content of the link is essentially advertisement too. It was posted by the VP of Business Development of Tabnine. Is this really organically ending up on the front page or are some bot/vote rings in control? @dang shouldn't the title at least be changed to "Announcing our Next-generation AI models"?

BrandonJung 4y ago
my guess given that I do not have significant karma points is that this is a subject that millions of devs are trying to understand more deeply (a million plus for both Tabnine and Copilot). There are two competitors with significantly different takes on how we solve this problem both technically and securely.

JCWasmx86 4y ago

This is really interesting, $12 a month are a good price IMO. Is it possible to use TabNine without using the random executable from https://update.tabnine.com/3.2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/TabNine https://update.tabnine.com/3.2.28/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/... (Or is there the source available?) Are there any instructions on to make it work with any other editor (GNOME-Builder in my case)? Is there Vala support? Edit: Found this: https://github.com/codota/TabNine/blob/master/HowToWriteAClient.md https://github.com/codota/TabNine/blob/master/HowToWriteACli...

joelthelion 4y ago

Can we hope for a local, open-source version of these models some day?

BrandonJung 4y ago
it is a question we are always asking but not sure what people would do if they were open-sourced. Did you have a specific use case in mind?

mellosouls 4y ago

"Understanding AI for coders..." For any coders who might think this article will help them understand AI, the actual title is: Announcing our Next-generation AI models Perhaps it has changed since being posted but it's just a plug.