• By quade
• 28 April 2024

Augment AI Released to Rival GitHub Copilot

A recent StackOverflow poll shows that 44% of software engineers claim they use AI tools to help with their work, with another 26% hoping to use them soon. There are hopes that by 2028, three-fourths of the industry will use coding assistants. With these considerable developments, there is a need for AI tools that can handle more tasks. One of these is Augment AI. 

Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky made this claim after announcing the release of his AI platform. He hopes this will be the platform that coders like himself want to use. 

Augment AI Was Released Last Week

Augment AI was officially released last Wednesday, having emerged from seemingly nowhere. But with their release, they have funding worth $252 million, with a valuation worth $977 million, putting them close to a unicorn startup.

Among the investors who put their money into the project are former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs like Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, and Meritech Capital. They put their money into this company because they hope the business will shake up the young AI coding industry.

“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex, and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades. Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software quicker.”

– Igor Ostrovsky, Founder of Augment AI.

History of Augment AI

Ostrovsky had worked at Microsoft for almost seven years where he worked on Midori, an operating system that was never released, but integrated into other products. After leaving, he joined a flash data storage and software product startup called Pure Storage as an engineer. 

 In 2022, Ostrovsky and an AI research scientist from Google, Guy Gur-Ari worked together to create Augment’s MVP. They began recruiting other former engineers from major businesses like Google and Shopify to create their team. Despite these high-level employees, they insisted on keeping operations quiet.

Even during interviews, Ostrovsky wasn’t keen on revealing too many details about their project or Augment AI features, aside from using “industry-leading” models. He did reveal that Augment AI will use a standard software-as-a-service subscription. 

“Our funding provides many years of runway to continue to build what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI. We’re accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering, and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.”

– Igor Ostrovsky, Founder of Augment AI.

What is known is that Augment AI will function as a coding assistant and they hope it will rival GitHub’s Copilot. This means it will be expected to perform tasks like generating code, checking for errors, and creating functions.

Future of Augment AI

For Augment AI, they should expect fierce competition as many tech giants have now created their own AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, AWS CodeWhisperer, and Google’s Gemini Code Assist and some startups like Magic, Tabnine, and Codegen have started their own AI coding.

This means that they will need to deal with multiple rivals to succeed. The company has already started moving to set itself up in the industry. Ostrovsky mentioned having hundreds of developers and dozens of companies using the Augment AI early access software, though whether this momentum can continue remains to be seen.

One way Augment AI might get an edge over its competition is by solving some of the long-standing issues that have been plaguing AI coding tools, especially around security.

Analysis of GitClear has shown that even though it is one of the leading coding tools, it still has issues generating bad code that requires a human to rework. A study by Stanford shows that companies that completely accept AI coding recommendations are more likely to experience security issues. This is true for many other AI tools, raising the risks of bugs and backdoors that bad actors can exploit.  

For AI coding to reach the next level, serious quality control issues must be enacted to ensure the best performance possible. 

None of this is even mentioning the copyright risks of AI. Because many models are trained on public data, it is at risk of committing copyright infringement. If Augment AI can train its model around this issue, it will go a long way in addressing these issues and avoiding legal troubles.

“Current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise. We’re poised to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”

– Igor Ostrovsky, Founder of Augment AI.

What Does This Mean for BPO and IT Services?

In an industry filled with companies trying to create their own AI coding tool, there is a challenge to set yourself apart from the rest of the market. While our geniusOS team believes there is potential with Augment AI. With how many backers they’ve gained and their near status as a unicorn startup, there is a chance they can rise to be one of the best AI services out there.

That doesn’t mean the path will be easy though. AI coding remains one of the hottest IT outsourcing trends so there is plenty of competition and many hurdles that must be cleared. For a service like Augment AI, they must do something very different or effective if they want to stand out.

Right now, one of the biggest hurdles is making the coding tools more dynamic, both to reduce security risks and create IT BPO solutions. With how much money Augment AI raised, they had best use it wisely to try and address this problem.