Meta launches its own AI code-writing tool

SAN FRANSCISCO: Meta on Thursday launched its own AI tool called Code Llama to generate new code and debug human-written work. The large language model (LLM) can use text prompts to generate and discuss code.

“Code Llama is state-of-the-art for publicly available LLMs on coding tasks. It has the potential to make workflows faster and more efficient for developers and lower the barrier to entry for people who are learning to code,” Meta said in a statement.

Code Llama has the potential to be used as a productivity and educational tool to help programmers write more robust, well-documented software.

Code Llama is a code-specialised version of Llama 2 that was created by further training Llama 2 on its code-specific datasets, sampling more data from that same dataset for longer.

Essentially, Code Llama features enhanced coding capabilities. It can generate code and natural language about code, from both code and natural language prompts. It can also be used for code completion and debugging.

It supports many of the most popular programming languages, including Python, C++, Java, PHP, Typescript (Javascript), C#, Bash and more.

“We are releasing three sizes of Code Llama with 7B, 13B and 34B parameters respectively. Each of these models is trained with 500B tokens of code and code-related data,” explained Meta.

The three models address different serving and latency requirements.

“Programmers are already using LLMs to assist in a variety of tasks. The goal is to make developer workflows more efficient so that they can focus on the most human-centric aspects of their job, rather than repetitive tasks,” said Meta.

Code Llama is designed to support software engineers in all sectors -- including research, industry, open source projects, NGOs and businesses.