ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and NVIDIA, has announced StarCoder2 which was released on February 28th, a family of open‑access large language models (LLMs) for code generation that sets new standards for performance, transparency, and cost‑effectiveness.
StarCoder2 was developed by the BigCode community, stewarded by ServiceNow, the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, and Hugging Face, the most‑used open‑source platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets and applications.
Trained on 619 programming languages, StarCoder2 can be further trained and embedded in enterprise applications to perform specialized tasks such as application source code generation, workflow generation, text summarization, and more. Developers can use its code completion, advanced code summarization, code snippets retrieval, and other capabilities to accelerate innovation and improve productivity.
StarCoder2 offers three model sizes: a 3 billion‑parameter model trained by ServiceNow, a 7 billion‑parameter model trained by Hugging Face, and a 15 billion‑parameter model built by NVIDIA with NVIDIA NeMo and trained on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure. The smaller variants provide powerful performance while saving on compute costs, as fewer parameters require less computing during inference. In fact, the new StarCoder2 3 billion‑parameter model also matches the performance of the original StarCoder 15 billion‑parameter model.
Fine‑Tuning Advances Capabilities with Business‑Specific Data
StarCoder2 models share a state‑of‑the‑art architecture and carefully curated data sources from BigCode that prioritize transparency and open governance to enable responsible innovation at scale.
The foundation of StarCoder2 is a new code dataset called The Stack v2 which is more than 7x larger than The Stack v1. In addition to the advanced data set, new training techniques help the model understand low‑resource programming languages (such as COBOL), mathematics, and program source code discussions.
StarCoder2 advances the potential of future AI‑driven coding applications, including text‑to‑code and text‑to‑workflow capabilities. With broader, deeper programming training, it provides repository context, enabling accurate, context‑aware predictions. These advancements serve seasoned software engineers and citizen developers alike, accelerating business value and digital transformation.
Users can fine‑tune the open‑access models with industry or organization‑specific data using open‑source tools such as NVIDIA NeMo or Hugging Face TRL.
Organizations have already fine‑tuned the foundational StarCoder model to create specialized task‑specific capabilities for their businesses.
ServiceNow’s text‑to‑code Now LLM was purpose‑built on a specialized version of the 15 billion‑parameter StarCoder LLM, fine‑tuned and trained for ServiceNow workflow patterns, use‑cases, and processes. Hugging Face also used the model to create its StarChat assistant.
BigCode Fosters Open Scientific Collaboration in AI
BigCode represents an open scientific collaboration jointly led by Hugging Face and ServiceNow. Its mission centers on the responsible development of LLMs for code.
The BigCode community actively participated in the technical aspects of the StarCoder2 project through working groups and task forces, leveraging ServiceNow’s Fast LLM framework to train the 3 billion‑parameter model, Hugging Face’s nanotron framework for the 7 billion‑parameter model, and the end‑to‑end NVIDIA NeMo cloud‑native framework and NVIDIA TensorRT‑LLM software to train and optimize the 15 billion‑parameter model.
Fostering responsible innovation is at the core of BigCode’s purpose, demonstrated through its open governance, transparent supply chain, use of open‑source software, and the ability for developers to opt data out for training. StarCoder2 was built using responsibly sourced data under license from the digital commons of Software Heritage, hosted by Inria.
StarCoder2, as with its predecessor, will be made available under the BigCode Open RAIL‑M license, allowing royalty‑free access and use. Furthermore, the supporting code for the models resides on the BigCode project’s GitHub page.
All StarCoder2 models will also be available for download from Hugging Face and the StarCoder2 15B model is available on NVIDIA AI Foundation models for developers to experiment with directly from their browser, or through an API endpoint.
For more information on StarCoder2, visit https://huggingface.co/bigcode.
ServiceNow Announces Acquisitions of 4Industry and EY Smart Daily Management Application
Posted in Commentary with tags ServiceNow on March 18, 2024 by itnerdServiceNow today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire 4Industry, a Netherlands‑based partner whose manufacturing technology application is built on the Now Platform, and has completed the acquisition of Smart Daily Management, a connected digital worker application from EY. Together, the deals augment ServiceNow’s existing operational technology (OT) management capabilities, adding Connected Worker solutions and enhancing expertise across key industrial markets such as manufacturing, energy and transport & logistics.
4Industry, founded in 2018, brings a mobile‑enabled application to make shop floor work more intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable through a suite of digital tools and Smart Daily Management from EY, which creates more efficiency around time‑consuming tasks, will enable ServiceNow’s industrial customers to drive operational excellence. The technology and industry expertise from 4Industry and the Smart Daily Management application will be utilized to build a new Connected Worker solution on the ServiceNow platform, expected in 2025.
This example of continued investment in European tech and talent will significantly enhance ServiceNow’s long‑term roadmap for its global customers, delivering continuity across IT, OT, and factory floor workers. ServiceNow will continue to maintain a strong alliance with EY and partnership with Plat4mation, an affiliated services company of 4Industry. It will work jointly with these companies, as innovation and implementation alliance partners for both existing OT solutions as well as future Connected Worker solutions.
4Industry and Smart Daily Management from EY follow acquisitions of UltimateSuite, G2K, Atrinet’s NetACE technology and Element AI as part of ServiceNow’s ongoing commitment to bringing impactful automation to customers. ServiceNow closed the acquisition of Smart Daily Management in early March and expects to close the acquisition of 4Industry in the coming weeks. Financial terms of the deals will not be disclosed.
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