GitHub launches GitHub Models with AI playground for developers.

GitHub's giving its 100 million+ users a shiny new AI toy to play with. It’s adding an AI playground to its platform. Think of it as your personal AI sandbox, right where you already store your code.

What's going on here?

GitHub's rolling out "GitHub Models," letting developers test-drive various AI models directly on their platform.

What does this mean?

At the core of GitHub Models is a nifty playground to test prompts and fiddle with parameters, all for free.

If you dig what you see, you can seamlessly move to coding with these models in Codespaces or VS Code. And if you're ready for the big leagues, there's a clear path to deploy via Azure too. GitHub promises your prompts and outputs won't be shared or used to train the models.

You can tinker with big-name models like GPT-4o, Llama 3.1, and Mistral Large 2 right on GitHub in the limited beta. More language, vision, and other models are in the pipeline as they gear up for general availability.

Why should I care?

GitHub wants to keep "AI engineers" (software engineers using AI APIs) on their platform. Many are shifting to tools like Replit and Cursor, but GitHub wants to offer native AI access to make their Copilot offering more appealing.

Testing multiple models in one place is a big ask from AI engineers, and entire startups are being built to tackle this. GitHub's current lineup doesn't quite cut it for me though—I'd love to see top models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI side-by-side. The current option feels like single-party elections 🫣.