BigCode is an open scientific collaboration led jointly by Hugging Face and ServiceNow that works on the responsible development of large language models for code.

StarCoder and StarCoderBase are Large Language Models for Code (Code LLMs) trained on permissively licensed data from GitHub, including from 80+ programming languages, Git commits, GitHub issues, and Jupyter notebooks. Similar to LLaMA, we trained a ~15B parameter model for 1 trillion tokens. They fine-tuned StarCoderBase model for 35B Python tokens, resulting in a new model that they call StarCoder.

They found that StarCoderBase outperforms existing open Code LLMs on popular programming benchmarks and matches or surpasses closed models such as code-cushman-001 from OpenAI (the original Codex model that powered early versions of GitHub Copilot). With a context length of over 8,000 tokens, the StarCoder models can process more input than any other open LLM, enabling a wide range of interesting applications.