ServiceNow and Hugging Face launch StarCoder, a powerful and ethical code-generating model.

Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research have released StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems like GitHub's Copilot. StarCoder was trained on over 80 programming languages and text from GitHub repositories, including documentation and programming notebooks. It integrates with Microsoft's Visual Studio Code code editor and can follow basic instructions and answer questions about code. StarCoder is part of Hugging Face's and ServiceNow's over-600-person BigCode project, launched last year, which aims to develop "state-of-the-art" AI systems for code in an "open and responsible" way.