Amazon undercuts Microsoft by offering free access to AI coding assistant

Photo from Sunrise King/Unsplash

Amazon announced on Thursday it is making its AI-powered coding assistant, CodeWhisperer, available for free to anyone who signs up. The tool currently costs $10 a month from Microsoft.

CodeWhisperer is an Amazon preview tool that allows developers to generate lines of code based on text prompts within various integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Visual Studio Code.

Originally only available to Amazon Web Services users, the new free tier will make it more accessible for non-AWS users as well.

A code suggestion that is similar to open-source training data is automatically flagged by CodeWhisperer as biased or unfair. A developer can also use security scanning features to identify vulnerabilities within their code and suggest ways to close them.

In addition to Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and C#, CodeWhisperer also supports Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, Shell scripting, SQL, and Scala.

Copilot AI tool, announced by Microsoft-owned GitHub last June, beat Amazon to the punch.

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The coding assistant generates and suggests code from within an IDE, but Microsoft only made it free for students and developers working on popular open-source projects, requiring all other users to pay $10 per month or $100 per year for access. Google’s DeepMind has its own AlphaCode tool as well, but it’s still in testing.

Aside from this announcement, Amazon is launching something called Bedrock, which allows companies to build and scale generative AI applications. The platform has a number of foundational models (FMs) on which developers can build, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Stable Diffusion, and Amazon Titan.

With this, third parties should be able to build AI-powered tools to generate text, answer questions, create summaries, and more.

Raphael Garcia

Raphael is a person born between the generations of Millenial and Gen Z. He was produced by Cavite State University (Main Campus) with a bachelor's degree in Political Science. The lad has a fresh take on things, but can still stay true to his roots. He writes anything in Pop Culture as long as it suits his taste (if it doesn't, it's for work). He loves to wander around the cosmos and comes back with a story to publish.