• By quade
• 20 May 2024

Codeium AI Might Have Cracked the Code for AI Assistants

In the realm of AI-driven coding assistants, Microsoft’s Copilot is one of the most famous. With massive resources and a huge user base, it remains one of the most prominent AI assistants. However, Microsoft might soon have a rival as a new system, Codeium AI is gaining momentum.

Originally known as Exafunction in 2021, Codeium started as an infrastructure startup, providing big computing for businesses developing their language models. Codeium’s CEO Varun Mohan and his business partner, Douglas Chen, believe the sky’s the limit for developments in AI coding.

Shifting to AI

By late 2022, ChatGPT emerged and showed the potential of AI. Mohan and Chen saw how successful these AI tools can be and jumped on the bandwagon. They were impressed with the Google-developed transformer model, that powers most large language models (LLMs).

“Very rarely do you see something that drops that completely changes the world all in one shot. This is extremely, extremely uncommon. And that’s what makes it so cool.”

– Varum Mohan, Codium CEO

This potential led them to launch Codeium AI in early 2023, serving as a coding assistant. Their main product was an intelligent AI code generation tool powered by a custom LLM. Customers will be able to run it with their systems, the cloud, or with Chat GPT.

Codeium integrates with over 40 development environments, such as JetBrains, VS Code, and Eclipse. It also supports 70 programming languages, including widely used ones like Java, Python, and SQL.

When the company released Codeium AI, it started with around 1,000 users. However, the company has grown rapidly as more companies have seen their potential and they now have a user base of over 600,000.

Codeium AI Catching Up With GitHub

At the time of Codeium’s launch, GitHub Copilot was created through a collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI. This system has established itself since its debut in June 2021. Microsoft accomplished this by taking advantage of its headstart. They have integrated Copilot into multiple systems, even placing a special key to activate it on its keyboard.

However, despite its advantages, there is still room for other systems such as Codeium AI, especially if they offer other benefits outside of the Microsoft system. Mohan has noticed that other companies like Bitbucket, Gitlab, Mercurial, Subversion, and CVS over GitHub. He took this as proof that there was room for their system.

“There’s a lot of different tools that people use to store their source code. We give people personalized experiences, so we make sure that the code that gets generated is actually tied to the private code that a company has. And we actually made sure that the models are tuned and trained on permissively licensed data. So not data that is GPL-licensed.”

– Varum Mohan, Codium CEO

What Can Codeium AI Do?

Codeium operates like a junior programmer assisting the human programmer in generating code. Its autocomplete feature completes the line of code initiated by the human while its AI chat function enables the human programmer to ask questions about all the code in the repository.

By automatically generating an index for each code base it encounters, Codeium can more effectively respond to developer queries and provide more accurate suggestions, Mohan explains. This capability results in significant time savings for developers.

Codeium AI has been a big help in shrinking the time to create a new code base. In the past, it could take as much as six months to create a fully functional system, but Mohan now claims they can do it in six weeks.

Since Codeium understands the context of the code it interacts with, it can reuse and create lines of code that are more efficient. This reduces the amount of bloat that Codeium AI has to deal with.

What Are Codeium AI’s Limitations?

This isn’t to say that Codeium AI is perfect. It has its fair share of limitations as these tools cannot generate new software on their own or test it. It also is difficult to integrate it with existing codebases. This is because this AI has the habit of hallucinating, especially without human oversight. For Codeium AI to function effectively, it requires human oversight at all times.

“It’s for the building of code, for generating ideas, and for more quickly reviewing software. However, the core fundamental principles of the software development lifecycle are still the same. You need to test your code, debug your code, review your code, and deploy your code. We process over 100 billion tokens of code every day, which is over 10 billion lines of code every day,” he says. “We’re one of the top five largest generative AI apps in the world in terms of the amount of text processed every day for the product.”

– Varum Mohan, Codium CEO

Mohan revealed that approximately 45% of all software produced by Codeium is integrated into customers’ codebases, surpassing the industry average significantly.

Among these adopters is Dell, a Texas-based computer giant that was one of Codeium AI’s biggest adopters. Dell developers increased their productivity by staying focused within the IDE, reducing context-switching, and maintaining a prolonged “flow state.”

“Writing software isn’t the only thing that developer does, but the reason why it still provides a lot of value is Codium is able to enable the developer to navigate software way more quickly. If there’s context switching overhead, if you make them look at a Web page, where they can’t test the software, they can’t compile the software, and then after that, they need to bring it back to the IDE,”

– Varum Mohan, Codium CEO

“Large-scale autonomous agents replacing the way in which software development works in the next year, despite the existing hysteria, probably is not going happen. But is AI going to generate and do higher- and higher-level tasks? Yes. I think the next five years are going to be very crazy. There’s going to be a lot of innovation.”

– Varum Mohan, Codium CEO

How Codeium AI Can Benefit BPO Services

Codeium AI offers transformative solutions for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services. The business of IT BPO Outsourcing Services is about providing fast yet efficient services. AI tools like Codeium AI can be a big help here.

It can streamline repetitive tasks and make the work more enjoyable. At the same time, this reduces human error and accelerates processing times. More importantly, without having to deal with the slog, employees can enjoy their work more and increase productivity while using fewer resources. 

These BPO and IT services can use AI to quickly analyze vast amounts of data. Providing that information quickly lets them provide personalized services and market analyses. Additionally, Codeium AI follows all the necessary regulations, ensuring that what you create won’t break industry rules.