Recently, Google announced the general availability (GA) of its Duet AI for Developers, providing developers with IDE coding assistant and chat.
The GA release of Duet AI for Developers is a follow-up of the Duet AI in Google Cloud preview announced earlier this year at Google Cloud Next. It offers developers AI code completion, code generation, and chat in multiple integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Cloud Shell Editor, Cloud Workstations, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio Code. In addition, Duet AI for Developers supports 20+ programming languages, such as C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, and Python.
Like Microsoft with Copilot, Google is putting AI into its offerings with Duet AI. The company has incorporated its Gemini model into it or plans to do so in the coming weeks. Moreover, AI code completion and generation tools like GitHub's Copilot have gained widespread popularity, and Google is taking a different approach by collaborating with 25 companies, including Confluent, HashiCorp, and MongoDB, to utilize their datasets for training Duet AI for Developers, aiding in code writing and troubleshooting for their respective platforms.
Furthermore, Datadog, JetBrains and LangChain will provide documentation and knowledge sources that will likely be most useful in the Duet AI for Developers chat experience. Using this data, the service will be able to provide development and ops teams with information about how to create test automation, resolve issues in production, and remediate vulnerabilities, for example.
Overview of the partner ecosystem of Duet AI for Developers (Source: Google blog post)
Currently, until the end of January 2024, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free, and after that it will, it will cost $19 per user per month with an annual commitment. A respondent on a Reddit thread commented:
It's worse than GPT4 and $19/mo with a yearly commitment. Hard pass. Plus, the setup is laborious. I use Blackbox, and that was just installing an extension in VSCode. Free and done it a few clicks.
In addition, in a Hacker News thread discussing Google’s advances in AI, a respondent wrote:
By the time LaMDA came out, we already had ChatGPT. Palm2 was a serious ChatGPT competitor, but by that point, we had GPT4. Imagen was trained in mid-2022 (!) and could do text and everything, but they locked it away until SD and Midjourney had claimed the market. When it finally came out, nobody found it interesting. And now we have Gemini, which appears to be equal to or slightly worse than GPT4, which itself was trained in mid-2022.
They just don't ship things fast enough.
Lastly, according to the company, developers will also be able to customize Duet AI for Developers, allowing them to receive code suggestions informed by internal private code and following their organization's code conventions. This capability is expected to become available in Q2 of 2024.