As a new AI-driven coding assistant is launched, the battle for AI-mindshare moves to developers

With the news that Microsoft’s Copilot is getting OpenAI’s latest models and a new code interpreter, it’s clear the battle over the future of AI is increasingly being fought at the developer and engineering level.

If you can get developers hooked on “your” AI Copilot, then you will be able to better sell into that market and, bluntly, keep the addicts coming back for more. Who influences developers and engineers, with the “drug” of an AI copilot, will end up having a huge amount of influence in the future of AI overall.

As a result of the latest announcements, Copilot will be able to better understand queries and offer better responses, Yusuf Mehdi, EVP and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, told the media recently.

Copilot was developed by GitHub and OpenAI, and is built on OpenAI’s language models.

Similarly, Prague-based JetBrains — which developed the Kotlin programming language recommended by Google for Android development — has just released JetBrains AI Assistant, a Microsoft Copilot alternative.

The Assistant will be integrated into JetBrains’ development environments (IDEs), code editors and other products and powered by LLMs from OpenAI, Google and JetBrains itself. In fact, the company wants to be a “neutral” provider of these AI assistant LLMs.

This also mean’s Europe’s JetBrains AI Assistant will compete with the U.S.-based Microsoft Copilot and Google. Indeed, Google’s Android Studio is even powered by JetBrains’s IntelliJ platform.

They are pushing at an open door. A lot of businesses relying on GPT4 for underlying services were thrown into chaos during the OpenAI management crisis.

Being able to draw on multiple AI providers for code development could well be seen as a longer-term strategic move.

However, JetBrains — which has never taken external funding, runs entirely on revenues and is said to be worth about $7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — is unlikely to have all the fun.

Microsoft is a formidable player, and as a result of all the recent tumult with OpenAI it now has a far tighter grip on the development of OpenAI and thus the destiny of its Copilot product.