Generative artificial intelligence and large language models have taken the world by storm in the last few years, says Arjun Guha, associate professor of computer science at Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. They are having a particularly significant impact on programming.

Computer scientists, programmers, and smaller-market players, however, have very limited insight into the development process of these models, and that prevents them from developing a deeper understanding of the technology. It also excludes them from meaningful participation in its further expansion.

That is why Guha and his research group got heavily involved in the BigCode project, launched by two private companies, Hugging Face and ServiceNow.