The founder said that the user base was growing rapidly but the revenue was zero, and the development of "AI programming artifact" Kite was stopped.

Can you believe it?

#"AI programming artifact" Kite once had 500,000 monthly active users , but now we have to say goodbye completely!

Kite is an AI-driven code completion plug-in that helps developers write code faster and stay fluent. And supports 13 languages and 16 editors.

In the heyday of Kite, many developers were interested in this "Programming Black Technology" was full of praise, even including Guido van Rossum, the father of Python:

However, after several years of updates and changes in the technology industry After the "big wave", on November 16, Kite founder Adam Smith stated in the company's blog: "The development of Kite has been stopped and the Kite software will no longer be maintained."

According to netizens, Kite seems to have become unavailable for download as early as 2021.

On Kite’s social media account, their last tweet stayed forever on April 9 last year. It's really sad news.

From 2014 to 2022, Kite, which lasted 8 years, finally came to an end, which also made us more pessimistic about the prospects of AI programming. .

"Programming Black Artifact" that supports 13 languages

In recent years, AI tools dedicated to providing services to developers have increasingly come into people's vision.

Start-ups such as DeepCode provide AI-supported code review services for programmers, while technology giants such as Microsoft are trying to apply AI to the "full cycle" of program development.

Founded in 2014 in California, Kite once stood out from many competing products and had 500,000 monthly active developers at its "peak".

Before getting involved in using AI to help developers write code, Kite CEO Adam Smith founded Xobni in 2007 - which is A search plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, acquired by Yahoo in July 2013.

In April 2016, Kite made a "low-key appearance" in Hacker News, the largest foreign technology community, and released its first cloud computing-based version in March 2017.

In January 2019, Kite received up to US$17 million in angel round financing to expand its R&D team, aiming to focus on improving developer productivity.

On that list of investors, a series of prominent names such as GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, PayPal founder Max Levchin, Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, all seem to indicate that this AI programming tools have a bright future.

In order to speed up support for other languages, Kite turned to using OpenAI's GPT-2 for natural language processing in 2019.

GPT-2 is trained to predict the next word based on previous words in a piece of text. It's powerful enough to generate human-like written paragraphs.

In May 2020, after training the machine model on 30 million files, Kite, which initially only supported Python completion, added support for JavaScript and also used deep learning Updated Python engine.

In October 2020, Kite welcomed the largest update since its launch, Increase the number of supported languages ​​to 13 in one fell swoop!

Newly supported languages ​​include Java, C, C++, C#, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, Scala, Go, HTML/CSS and Less – almost all of which are in front of RedMonk List of the 20 most popular programming languages.

In addition to programming languages, Kite also supports a variety of code editors and IDEs, including VS Code, JetBrains’ IDE-PyCharm, IntelliJ, and GoLand , Android Studio, WebStorm, CLion, PhpStorm, RubyMine, Rider, AppCode -- as well as JupyterLab, Vim, Sublime, Atom, and Spyde.

With such a powerful "AI programming artifact", many functions cannot be "for nothing".

According to netizens who have experienced Kite, although ordinary users can download and use it for free, they can only use the "AI programming" function a limited number of times - probably a few dozen. Lines of code look like.

If you want to generate more codes, you must activate Pro on the official website. In the case of annual subscription, Kite’s VIP price is about US$12/month, which is not very cheap.

Kite also launched Team Server in February 2021, which is the enterprise version of Kite.

Of course, Kite’s paid option will only be activated if the user is programming in Python.

"Python is built differently than other languages. Python has our richest feature set, including documentation and function signatures, which is one of the reasons we have chosen to monetize only Python ." Kite founder Adam Smith explained.

Founder: 500,000 monthly income, basically 0 income

In the last blog published on Kite’s official website, founder Adam Smith believed that "The algorithm is not good enough" and "Users don't buy it" are the main reasons for their entrepreneurial failure.

"First, we failed to realize our vision of AI-assisted programming."

"We built the most advanced AI at the time to help developers, but it didn't achieve the 10x improvement needed to achieve a breakthrough because the technical level of "ML on code" was not good enough."

"The biggest problem is that state-of-the-art models do not understand the structure of the code, such as non-local context. We have made some progress towards better code models, but the problem is engineering intensive. "

"Building a production-quality tool that can reliably synthesize code would probably cost more than $100 million, and no one has tried it yet."

「Secondly, the commercial prospects of our product are not good either - it took us a long time to figure this out.」

"In 2019, five years after the company was founded, we had 500,000 monthly active users, but almost no revenue was generated."

"Our The verdict: Individual developers won’t buy tools, only their managers might. But just making developers write code 18% faster – that’s not sensational enough for them either.”

Adam Smith also said that his team had tried business transformation and hoped to use “code search” to provide other services to developers, but “after seven years of intense work and the pressure of early entrepreneurship, our team I was too tired, so I finally decided to make a "soft landing.""

Netizen: Kite is powerful, but not easy to use

So,This Is this "programming black technology" easy to use?

According to statistics from the software review website G2, among the 59 users who have used Kite, nearly 90% of them scored 4 points or above. High score, the overall rating is 4.2 points.

Although it has never officially entered the Chinese market, this AI-assisted programming tool has still gained a large number of "iron fans" in China.

Although it cannot be downloaded from the official website as early as 2021, in order to use it smoothly, many persistent netizens still discovered a lot of "side theories." It is enough to show that to a certain extent, Kite can still meet the needs of many programmers.

However, the following two netizens’ statements after actual experience may give us a clearer understanding. To the shortcomings of Kite.

One person said, "On python, (Kite) seems to be better than vscode's Intelsense and coc, but it supports fewer languages ​​​​(vimL, bash), and it does not Open source. Temporarily deprecated."

Another person thought, "This is a code AI completion software, which is very easy to use. But it consumes a lot of memory. If your computer is not good, you can uninstall it at will." This shows that Kite is indeed not good enough in handling some details.

#Finally, in the eight years from birth to goodbye, there have been very few product updates on Kite’s official website.

# Therefore, the scarcity of the services provided by such a product obviously cannot meet the requirements of netizens for paid software.

From this point of view, it is not surprising that Kite finally died.

GitHub Copilot

In comparison, another AI code completion toolGitHub Copilot relies on 「Excellent performance」 Sent myself to court.

In June 2021, with the support of GPT-3, OpenAI and GitHub jointly launched this new code generation AI, which can automatically complete based on comments or already written code The entire function. Mainly for programming languages ​​​​such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby and Go.

In June 2022, GitHub Copilot will officially open for subscription, priced at US$10/month or US$100/year. Students and developers of popular open source projects can use it for free.

According to GitHub official statistics, Copilot has 1.2 million users since it was opened for testing one year ago.

Whether it’s good or not, many people will still say it smells great after using it!

However, since its birth, GitHub Copilot has been controversial due to code infringement and other issues.

Finally, in November 2022, OpenAI, Microsoft and GitHub were filed with a class action lawsuit accusing their artificial intelligence code generation software Copilot of violating copyright laws.

This lawsuit is also considered to be the first class action lawsuit in the United States to challenge the training and output of artificial intelligence systems.

Of course, GitHub claims, “We have been committed to innovating Copilot responsibly from the beginning and will continue to develop the product to provide developers around the world with the best Serve".

That doesn’t mean anything, does it?

Meanwhile, open source leaders are still considering all the implications of the lawsuit.

Simon Phipps, a veteran of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), mentioned, "The only certain conclusion about Copilot at the moment is that it is not suitable for use in open source projects."

Currently, Microsoft and OpenAI have not commented on the lawsuit.

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