Professional software development tool company JetBrains s.r.o. announced Tuesday the release of a new proprietary artificial intelligence large language model named Mellum trained in coding know-how that will assist software developers.

“Unlike typical large language models, Mellum is built specifically for coding,” said Valerie Kazmina, product marketing manager at JetBrains. “We are focused on creating a smaller, optimized model that significantly reduces latency, offering developers suggestions almost instantly. This makes Mellum more efficient than many of the third-party models currently available on the market.”

Mellum is currently integrated into the JetBrains AI Assistant, an intelligent coding companion available to users of the company’s independent development editors. These editors are software applications used by developers and engineers that combine the tasks of writing code, building, debugging and testing software into a single platform.

According to its testing, the company said, Mellum reduced the time it takes to produce code suggestions as developers write, reflecting a decrease of up to one-third of the previous time. Coders using the new LLM have an acceptance rate of around 40%, meaning that they hit enter and apply the suggested code, which is considered a high rate for the industry.

Mellum supports popular programming languages out-of-the-box, including Java, Kotlin, Python, Go and PHP. JetBrains said more languages are on the way and in testing. Users can join the early access program.

Cloud-based code completion is only available for users with an AI Pro subscription but users with paid versions of the company’s IntelliJ-based IDE have local AI-powered code completion bundled by default.

The release of Mellum is part of JetBrain’s strategy to maintain an industry-leading role with its developer platform products and AI-powered coding assistants. By streamlining an LLM for code-only on the code-completion side, it can provide developers with fast, accurate suggestions in their code and leave the copilot needs to its AI chatbot. Competitors in the AI-code assistant industry include Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub and Tabnine Ltd., which also have IDE-integrated code completion and copilot tools.

“Mellum’s power isn’t just in its speed and accuracy; it also benefits from deep integration with JetBrains IDEs,” said Kazmina. “This synergy between the client-side IDE and server-side AI logic allows Mellum to deliver contextually aware code suggestions that are tailored to each project’s needs.”

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