Hugging Face and ServiceNow Launch BigCode to Open Source AI Code Generation
Hugging Face and ServiceNow partner on BigCode, a new project aiming to build and openly release a state-of-the-art code-generating AI model. The initiative directly addresses the controversies surrounding proprietary systems by committing to responsible and transparent development practices.
Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research launch BigCode, a new collaborative project that aims to develop state-of-the-art code-generating AI systems in an open and responsible manner. Unlike commercial offerings such as OpenAI's Codex or DeepMind's AlphaCode, this initiative focuses on creating freely accessible technology to benefit the broader developer community.
The project plans to build a massive dataset for training and ultimately train a 15-billion-parameter model using ServiceNow's in-house graphics card cluster. The organizers model this effort after Hugging Face's previous BigScience project, and they currently invite professional AI researchers from academia and industry to apply and contribute to the development process.
BigCode also seeks to address the ethical and legal controversies surrounding AI-powered code generation, particularly regarding fair use and licensing. By open-sourcing the resulting system under clear terms, the project provides a transparent alternative to proprietary models that face ongoing criticism for training on public source code without explicit permissive licenses.