✨ GitHub Universe 2024 marks the start of a new AI era ✨

At GitHub Universe last week, one thing was crystal clear: AI has entered a new era. 

At the 10th annual conference (the biggest one yet!) we introduced new capabilities that transform our AI tool, GitHub Copilot, from a robust AI-powered assistant beloved by developers and enterprises alike, to one that’s uniquely flexible, secure, customizable, and ready for any and every task. 

To start, we introduced multi-model choice, which enables you to select from several industry-leading models—including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s upcoming Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-40, o1-preview, and o1-mini—so you can build in the best way for your project in the workflows you’re accustomed to.

We also introduced GitHub Spark, our new AI-native tool for creating and sharing  personalized, fully-functional web applications using only natural language. GitHub Spark’s intuitive user interface featuring a creativity feedback loop, live previews, automatically saved versions, and more, takes you from idea to micro app in just minutes.

The ability to turn natural language into apps is groundbreaking. As our CEO Thomas Dohmke noted in his keynote: “the floodgates of nerditude have swung wide open" emphasizing GitHub Spark’s potential to democratize coding and enable anyone from anywhere, regardless of technical background, to create software. 

We delivered more AI-native experiences across the platform, including:

• Power up your edits with new integrations for VS Code 💪🏼 With multi-file editing, you can easily use Copilot Chat in VS Code to make complex changes across multiple files at the same time—all based on natural language prompts. 

• Get your feet wet with GitHub Models 🦶🏾 GitHub Models is your go-to environment to compare, experiment, and build with top AI models from OpenAI, Cohere, Microsoft, and more. Now with support for multi-modal models, prompt sharing, and SDKs in Codespaces, you have everything you need to start building AI applications.

• Scale vulnerability remediation with Copilot Autofix 🛡️ Secure code with Copilot Autofix, which quickly identifies vulnerabilities and suggests fixes, for both new and historical code. Plus, it's free for open source projects.

• Get enterprise-grade control for complex needs 🏢 Give your teams the power to stay compliant and secure wherever they are with new compliance controls, enhanced data residency (currently region locked), and Arm64-powered runners for GitHub Enterprise.

Read more about all the amazing new goodness announced at GitHub Universe. 

But GitHub Universe was more than just product updates. We also released our annual Octoverse report, which shed light on the platform’s expanding developer ecosystem. 

Highlights include:

• Python goes pro 🚀 Python has become the most popular language on GitHub, driven by its extensive use in AI, data science, and machine learning projects.

• Number of devs globally has surged 💻 There are more developers than ever before, with notable increases in regions like Asia Pacific, Africa, and South America.

• First-time open source contributors grows 🧑 1.4 million new developers globally joined open source, with a majority contributing to commercially backed and generative AI projects.

• Open source continues to adopt AI 🪐 There's a marked increase in AI-related open source projects, reflecting the community's experimentation with and adoption of AI.

As GitHub Universe 2024 showed us, the future of software development is here, and it’s AI-powered and more collaborative than ever. Whether you're a developer, enterprise leader, or open source enthusiast, there’s never been a more exciting time to jump in.

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✨ This newsletter was written and produced by Gwen Davis. ✨