Google Cloud announced a strategic partnership with AI-assisted coding startup Replit.
The San Francisco, Calif.-based startup will get access to Google Cloud's infrastructure and foundation models to power its Ghostwriter AI-assisted coding platform. In return, Google will get access to Replit's collaborative code editing platform and help the firm distribute its software to a larger audience.
- Google's move comes as it sets out to "empower the next 1 billion software creators."
- Replit claims developers use its platform to generate nearly 30% of their code.
- The Ghostwriter platform has 20 million users.
- Replit has raised over $100M in equity funding to date from institutional investors, including Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, and A.Capital Ventures.
- Bloomberg reckons that Google made the move to ward off competition from Microsoft after its subsidiary GitHub launched the Copilot product last year, which uses OpenAI's language-generating AI to generate code.
