Stability AI, the party behind image generator Stable Diffusion, is coming out with StableCode. This large language model gets its first public release today, allowing programmers to deploy a new assistant.
ChatGPT is known to be able to produce programming code, although half the time this is nonsensical. However, that chatbot is actually intended as a recreational application of generative AI. For programmers, there was already GitHub Copilot, which, like ChatGPT, is based on OpenAI technology.
Now Stability AI comes with StableCode, which supports Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, C, markdown and C++. The LLM is trained on BigCode’s so-called stack dataset v1.2. Stability AI models are prepared for programming with 560 billion tokens of code.
Who is it intended for?
Stability AI already gives an indication for whom StableCode is intended: novice programmers. The company claims the tool is a “perfect assistant” courtesy of the autocomplete suggestions it can provide.
A special feature of StableCode is the fact that it has a large context window (16,000 tokens), something that is mostly a curtailment for LLMs. A large context window means that an LLM can take into account more information from the user, so the output given should be increasingly targeted. The downside is that the hardware requirements get larger and larger as the context window grows.
In short, the new innovation seems mostly a continuation of the current state of programming LLMs. It is capable of providing suggestions for assistance, but will not be able to replace any programmer.
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