“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, highlighting India’s growing significance in the AI landscape, with the country’s developers directly shaping the future of AI innovation worldwide,” said Sharryn Napier, VP of APAC at GitHub.

Napier said that India’s influence on technology is significant and it is evident from its open-source contributions. GitHub aims to boost this impact by equipping India’s 13.2 million developers with AI and accelerating innovation, productivity and overall progress.

The latest edition of GitHub’s State of the Octoverse report indicates that generative AI is driving a significant global spike in individual contributors to generative AI projects with 148 per cent year-over-year growth. Apart from India, the US, and Germany are leading in terms of developer communities, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the UK, and France.

The report also highlighted the trajectory of India’s developer community which has witnessed consistent growth including a 36 per cent increase in 2023. It also stated that the UN-backed Digital Public Goods Alliance and India’s work towards building a digital public infrastructure with open materials from software to AI models, also played a vital role in this growth.

New AI-powered features

Meanwhile, GitHub also announced the general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and previews of the new GitHub Copilot Enterprise offering. Along with new AI-powered features, the company also introduced the GitHub Copilot Partner Program.

GitHub Copilot Chat will generally be available in December 2023. It integrates natural language programming for developers and assists with error detection, unit test writing, and debugging as an AI companion. It is included in existing GitHub Copilot subscriptions and is free for students, teachers and open-source maintainers.

The Copilot chat is powered by GPT-4 and offers enhanced code suggestions. It comprehends code contexts, explains concepts, detects vulnerabilities, and even fixes errors. The inline Copilot Chat allows developers to discuss specific lines of code within the flow of their code and editor. Moreover, Slash commands and smart actions can simplify tasks like fixing code or creating tests. The Copilot Chat is expanding to JetBrains IDEs (integrated development environments) allowing access to developers from across multiple platforms.

Enhanced security and accessibility

The GitHub Copilot Chat is also coming to github.com and GitHub’s mobile app. The company is also directly integrating GitHub Copilot Chat into GitHub.com to help developers get insights, pull request analysis and get coding assistance. However, this feature will be accessible through subscriptions.

The company also introduced GitHub Copilot Enterprise which has been developed to integrate within a company’s codebase, enhancing developer productivity with personalised code suggestions and automating a variety of tasks. It is priced at $39 per user for a month and also assures enterprise-level security. It will be available from February 2024. Besides, the GitHub Copilot Partner Program also aims to extend the Copilots features by integrating it with third-party tools and services.

GitHub is also strengthening its platform with advanced security features powered by AI. However, these tools are currently in preview. GitHub Copilot Workspace is also being developed to fill the gap between conceptualisation and coding by offering AI-generated plans to implement changes. GitHub Copilot Workspace will arrive in 2024.