ServiceNow and Hugging Face have announced the release of StarCoder, a 15 billion parameter open access large language model (LLM) for code generation.
This project is the next milestone for the BigCode Project, an initiative led by ServiceNow Research and Hugging Face, to develop AI systems for code in an open and responsible manner with the support of the open-scientific AI research community.
Released on the Hugging Face platform, the StarCoder LLM aims to make generative AI more transparent and accessible to enable responsible innovation at scale and allow developers from organizations of all sizes to harness generative AI with the proper governance, safety and compliance protocols.
Covering over 80 programming languages from BigCode’s The Stack v1.2 dataset, StarCoder can be deployed to bring generative AI to applications with capabilities like text-to-code and text-to-workflow. Professional software engineers can tackle complex programming challenges and citizen developers can build new software regardless of technical ability.
The launch follows a growing number of AI capabilities announced for the Now Platform, including the recent Utah release.
“ServiceNow’s collaboration with Hugging Face expands our longstanding commitment to AI excellence,” said Harm de Vries, lead of the Large Language Model Lab at ServiceNow Research and co-lead of BigCode. “New, responsible AI practices to train and share large language models are vital to ensuring the right protocols, safeguards and permissive licenses are in place for our customers, and StarCoder is making this possible.”
“The joint efforts led by Hugging Face and ServiceNow enable the release of powerful base models that empower the community to build a wide range of applications more efficiently than a single company could come up with,” said Leandro von Werra, machine learning engineer at Hugging Face and co-lead of BigCode. “This endeavor is a testament to the potential of open source as we work toward democratizing AI.”