Microsoft-owned GitHub has announced that Indian developers were the second biggest contributors to artificial intelligence (AI) projects on its open-source developer platform, highlighting the country's growing significance in the AI landscape.
In its annual State of the Octoverse report, GitHub said that developer communities in the United States, India and Japan are creating the most number of generative AI projects on the platform followed by other regions such as Hong Kong (SAR), the United Kingdom and Brazil.
Globally, the total number of generative AI projects on the platform has shot up by 248 percent year-over-year and the number of individual contributors to generative AI projects has jumped by 148 percent year-over-year, the company said.
"India's growing developer community is central to the country's position as an innovation powerhouse. It's exciting to see Indian developers making significant contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub ... with the country’s developers directly shaping the future of AI innovation worldwide" said Sharryn Napier, vice-president of Asia Pacific region at GitHub.
This development comes amid a rapid surge in the country's developer population. About 3.5 million new developers from India joined the platform in 2023, bringing the total base of developers on the platform in the country to 13.2 million, a 36 percent increase yearly.
As per GitHub's projections based on the current growth rates, India is poised to overtake the United States in terms of total developer population on the platform by 2027, it said. The United States currently has a total base of 20.2 million developers, registering a 21 percent growth in the past year.
"As we saw with open source, India's influence extends far beyond creating competitive global enterprises; it’s impacting the future of technology and society as a whole," Sharryn said.
"Just imagine what India will be able to achieve if its 13.2 million developers are empowered with AI. Not only will this transform enterprise innovation and productivity, but it will elevate developer happiness and make a substantial impact on India's economy and society as a whole" he added.
GitHub said that India building its digital public infrastructure with open materials — ranging from software code to AI models — to improve digital payments and e-commerce systems for itself and other countries has helped contribute to this growth in the developer population.
New products
At its GitHub Universe developer conference, the company also launched several new products to infuse AI across every step of the developer lifecycle.
Copilot Chat, the programming-centric chatbot which was first unveiled in March, will become generally available to all individuals and organisations from December 2023 as part of users’ existing GitHub Copilot subscription. It will also be available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open-source projects.
Copilot Chat will also soon be integrated with GitHub's website so that developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis and answers. It will also be available in GitHub’s mobile app, as part of users’ existing GitHub Copilot subscription.
The company also introduced a new enterprise subscription tier of the Copilot Chat that companies can connect to their code repositories on GitHub to help developers quickly understand the internal codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code and quickly review pull requests among others. The tier will be generally available to enterprises for $39 per user per month in February 2024.
Besides this, GitHub introduced a Copilot partner program to bring more capabilities into Copilot with third-party developer tools, online services, and knowledge outside GitHub. At launch, GitHub has signed up 25 partners for this initiative including Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, Hashicorp, and Datadog.
The company also provided an early look into GitHub Copilot Workspace, which can serve as an AI-powered natural language bridge to help developers go from an idea into running code in minutes. The product is expected to debut in 2024.
"Copilot Workspace is like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI" said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in a statement.
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