Highlights:

  • The partnership will hasten the development of generative AI applications and demonstrates Google Cloud’s dedication to fostering the most open generative AI ecosystem.
  • Replit is one of the fastest-growing developer platforms, with over 20 million developers and over 240 million projects developed.

Recently, the cloud division of Google LLC announced a partnership with Replit Inc., the company behind a well-known coding platform used by over 20 million programmers.

Replit will employ Google’s extensive language models as part of the agreement to assist programmers in writing applications more quickly. The businesses also want to develop a variety of product connections.

An IDE, or integrated development environment, is a program software development teams use to write code. These apps integrate word processing functions with other productivity tools for developers. Replit offers a well-liked cloud-based IDE of the same name that is meant to be more user-friendly than conventional options.

The startup said last month that more than 20 million developers have signed up for its platform since its introduction. It closed a USD 80 million investment round headed by Coatue in December 2021, closing with 10 million developers. To date, it has received more than USD 104 million in fundraising.

Replit will have access to large language models thanks to its new partnership with Google Cloud. The business intends to add the innovation to Ghostwriter Chat, an AI-powered coding tool. The tool can explain current code, debug software issues, and generate code based on developers’ text prompts into Replit’s cloud-based IDE.

Vice president of cloud AI and industry solutions at Google Cloud, June Yang, said, “Generative AI can bring significant new capabilities to businesses and developers. Google Cloud infrastructure and foundation models in Vertex AI will power Replit’s widely adopted platform, delivering more performance and scalability to millions of developers around the world.”

Replit and Google Cloud intend to work together on other projects. The startup announced that it would host its cloud-based IDE using the infrastructure of the search engine giant. Also, the companies are developing product integrations to make it simple for Replit users to integrate Google Cloud services into their software projects.

Users of the startup will be given a simple method to get set up on GCP products by the Alphabet Inc. unit. Replit is now Google’s preferred IDE as well. Developers that utilize the software engineering tools in the Workspace productivity suite and Google Cloud Services will have access to the IDE.

One of the biggest cloud competitors to the search giant, Microsoft Corp., is also investing in AI-powered developer tooling. Its GitHub subsidiary unveiled a new version of its Copilot coding tool last week as part of the effort. The tool can generate both code and command line queries and is partially based on OpenAI LLC’s most recent GPT-4 model.