Founder and CEO of Tabnine, Dror Weiss and his team are the creators of the industry’s first AI-powered assistant for developers. As a generative AI technology veteran, he is on a mission to help developers and teams create better software faster.
In this quick conversation, Dror discusses how developers can leverage generative AI today, cover how open source is advancing the generative AI moment and share his thoughts on what’s to come.
M.R. Rangaswami: How can developers take advantage of generative AI technology today? What can they expect in terms of benefit?
Dror Weiss: Software developers can leverage generative AI for code today, in fact Tabnine has around 8M installs from VS Code and the Jetbrains Marketplace. Developers will see the most immediate benefit if they are working on languages that have a large open source example set (JavaScript, Python, etc). However, the value of generative AI for code is likely even higher with esoteric languages and unique code that are currently in the domain of enterprises.
Code completion numbers vary significantly (25-45%), but with detailed ROI studies our customers are seeing mid-teens to low twenties in actual productivity uplift.
M.R.: How is open source helping to advance the generative AI movement?
Dror: At the moment, open source cannot compete on spending and building the largest of models (i.e. GPT4) because currently these cost hundreds of millions of dollars and pull in as much data as possible.
However, we are already seeing strong evolution of open source to build smaller models that are built specially for use cases, such as code. We believe these specialized models are the way forward and have already significantly closed the difference with the largest models.
Much like Linux became the default for operating systems, we expect that open source will do the same for AI.
M.R.: What’s next for generative AI – for developers, the enterprise?
Dror: For developers, we believe generative AI for code will continue to expand into areas such as testing, chat and custom models. As for the enterprise, they are pushing for secure and controlled solutions, indicating they are all in on generative AI.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com