Google Brings Codey-Powered AI Coding to Colab – Free Copilot Alternative

Google announced that Colab will soon feature AI‑powered code generation, completion, and a chat assistant, all powered by the new Codey model.

Built on the PaLM 2 foundation and fine‑tuned with extensive code data, Codey supports over 20 programming languages including Go, Google Standard SQL, Java, JavaScript, Python and TypeScript, with special optimization for Python and Colab.

These features integrate with Colab’s cloud‑based Jupyter notebooks, allowing developers to use Keras, TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenCV and other frameworks on Google‑provided GPUs, currently free for all users (paid users can preview early).

The new “Generate” button lets users describe desired functionality in natural language, and the AI produces the corresponding code. Real‑time code completion offers context‑aware suggestions, while the built‑in chat bot can answer debugging, documentation, and data‑import questions such as “How to import data from Google Sheets?” or “How to filter a Pandas DataFrame?”.

Google positions this as a free alternative to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which launched in 2021 and added GPT‑4‑powered Copilot Chat in March 2023.

Colab’s AI tools aim to reduce repetitive coding, letting developers focus on higher‑value programming and data‑science tasks, and will roll out to paid users in the US first, followed by free users worldwide in the coming months.