StarCoderBase and StarCoder are Large Language Models (Code LLMs), trained on permissively-licensed data from GitHub. This includes data from 80+ programming language, Git commits and issues, Jupyter Notebooks, and Git commits. We trained a 15B-parameter model for 1 trillion tokens, similar to LLaMA. We refined the StarCoderBase for 35B Python tokens. The result is a new model we call StarCoder.
StarCoderBase is a model that outperforms other open Code LLMs in popular programming benchmarks. It also matches or exceeds closed models like code-cushman001 from OpenAI, the original Codex model which powered early versions GitHub Copilot. StarCoder models are able to process more input with a context length over 8,000 tokens than any other open LLM. This allows for a variety of interesting applications. By prompting the StarCoder model with a series dialogues, we allowed them to act like a technical assistant.