GitHub Copilot is no longer supported exclusively by OpenAI’s GPT models.

At the Universe event, GitHub announced some notable news. The company is moving to a multimodal approach that allows developers to use models from competing companies. In addition, GitHub presents a new official experiment: GitHub Spark. This allows developers to let Spark create a small web app based on natural language (in English).

GitHub Copilot goes multimodal

GitHub Copilot, the popular AI-based coding assistant, is taking the step towards multimodality. The company announced this news at its annual event. Originally, GitHub Copilot only supported OpenAI’s GPT models. Now developers also have the opportunity to choose competing models such as those from Anthropic or Google.

Thomas Dohmke, chief executive at GitHub, wrote in a blog post that users can now use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model in Copilot Chat’s web and VS Code interfaces, with Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro coming as another option . Additionally, GitHub Copilot supports a wide range of OpenAI GPT models, including GPT o1-preview and GPT o1-mini.

By providing developers with different models, they are given the freedom to switch between them. Certain models are better suited to some tasks than others. Additionally, organizations can also choose which models they make available to their employees in GitHub Copilot Enterprise.

GitHub Spark

GitHub Copilot, the generative AI coding assistant, helps developers generate code. The bot can autocomplete lines of code and even entire snippets. Although this wizard can greatly simplify the work of developers, it still requires good programming skills.

What if GitHub Copilot could turn your desires into natural language-based code? This is a question that GitHub has been asking itself for a long time and is now becoming an experiment. GitHub Spark is an official experiment that the company is launching in the GitHub Next Labs. Spark would be able to create small web apps based on natural language, currently only in English.

Experienced developers still have the option to view and edit the generated code. The bot creates a prototype that you can refine in subsequent steps.

Just as GitHub Copilot now gives users the choice of which model they work with, the same is the case with Spark. Developers can choose between OpenAI’s GPT models or Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet models.