GitHub, a leading AI-powered developer platform, today announced a transformative AI-powered platform at GitHub Universe. This innovation blends AI throughout every stage of the development lifecycle, establishing natural language as the universal programming language.

Among the many significant updates are Copilot Chat, which is now readily available to Copilot users inside the IDE at no additional cost, and will soon be brought to mobile and github.com. Other updates include the implementation of GPT-4 to provide code-aware guidance, an inline chat experience, slash commands for major tasks, smart actions for workflow shortcuts, and support for the JetBrains suite of IDEs.

A new subscription tier, Copilot Enterprise, has been introduced. This new tier brings together all the Copilot offerings and personalises them within the context of your organisation's codebases. The bespoke nature of this offering range enhances Copilot's productivity benefits considerably.

A new initiative called Copilot Workspace offers a significant peek at GitHub's vision for utilising AI to convert ideas into code swiftly. It combines GPT-4's reasoning capabilities with the knowledge of the codebase and issue details to provide a natural language interface that allows every developer to transform ideas into running code in minutes.

An enhancement to GitHub's Advanced Security equipped with GPT-4 powered security features such as code scanning autofix and secret scanning for generic secrets has been incorporated to prevent and detect security vulnerabilities across organisations more effectively.

The tech giant also released its 11th annual Octoverse report. It revealed some striking statistics, like the 21% increase in local developer growth in Australia in 2023 boosting the total number of GitHub users to 1.4 million. There was also a marked 248% rise in generative AI activity in open source with 65,000 public generative AI projects built on GitHub, almost a third of these benefited from a maintainer using GitHub Copilot.

GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, stated, "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are refounded on Copilot. AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace. In just a short span, GitHub Copilot has expanded and matured GitHub into the world's leading AI-powered developer platform."

Dohmke adds, "It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy - and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience."

GitHub is not only incorporating Copilot into every phase of the programming process, but it has also customised the tool to accommodate every developer's unique coding habits and workflows, making it a truly personalised experience. Additionally, the platform is also making strides to promote AI capabilities in crucial areas like resolving security vulnerabilities and providing code suggestions that contribute to more efficient web development collaboration.

Finally, the new GitHub Copilot Partner Program has been launched, integrating Copilot with third-party developer tools and services, improvising development and code optimisation processes. This includes over 25 debut partners, such as Datastax, LaunchDarkly, Postman, Hashicorp, and Datadog.

GitHub’s innovative approach to tooling developers with AI perfectly aligns with its vision of fostering a new future of software development, facilitating smoother programming and collaboration.