Creating a Coding Assistant with StarCoder — open-source LLM for code

AI Impact Summary

StarCoder, a 16B parameter model trained on a massive dataset of code, presents a viable open-source alternative to proprietary coding assistants like GitHub Copilot. This model’s enterprise-friendly license, large context length (8192 tokens), and multi-query attention capabilities make it particularly well-suited for code-based applications. The ability to fine-tune StarCoder for chat, as demonstrated with the ‘StarChat’ experiment, unlocks significant potential for creating personalized coding assistants, though inference costs remain a key consideration.