Developer platform GitHub has made a flurry of announcements at its annual GitHub Universe ‘24 conference held in San Francisco. GitHub Copilot will now give users choices between multiple models including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview and o1-mini. 

Developers using GitHub Copilot or VS Code will be able to toggle between models while chatting with Copilot Chat to select the appropriate model depending on the use case, if they want. 

Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet will be available via GitHub Copilot starting today and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro will be available in the coming weeks. 

The multi-model feature will be expanded to other GitHub Copilot functions soon. 

“In 2024, we experienced a boom in high-quality large and small language models that each individually excel at different programming tasks. There is no one model to rule every scenario, and developers expect the agency to build with the models that work best for them,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. 

The Microsoft-backed platform has also launched GitHub Spark so developers can build micro apps easily using natural language instructions. These fully functional micro apps that are termed as “sparks” can integrate AI features and external data sources without requiring any cloud management.

Users can use models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, the press release from GitHub explained, watch the live previews of both apps and compare them. Once finished, the app can be run on their desktop, tablet or mobile. 

Besides this, GitHub has also unveiled other updates including multi-file edit for GitHub Copilot in VS Code from November 1, Copilot Extensions for developer tools and services including Docker, Sentry, Atlassian Rovo and Stack Overflow from early 2025. Another new feature called GitHub Copilot for XCode offers code completion capabilities and feedback on code within 30 seconds. 

Separately, in the latest edition of their GitHub Octoverse report, the platform has revealed that India is now the fastest-growing developer community on there with more than 17 million developers. This is a jump of 28% from last year owing to a surge in generative AI-related activity in the country. 

India also has the second-highest number of GitHub Education users according to the report, the second-highest number of contributors to public GenAI projects and the second-highest number of contributions to open-source projects. 

GitHub has also predicted that India will become the largest developer community by 2028 surpassing the U.S.