NEAR AI Cloud Brings Private Inference to GitHub Copilot
Developers who rely on GitHub Copilot can now run models hosted on NEAR AI Cloud, thanks to a new VSCode extension. This integration plugs into Copilot Chat through the 'More Providers' extension, which supports 258 OpenAI-compatible options.
The extension allows users to point their code at NEAR AI Cloud without rewiring existing workflows. The platform exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, making it easy for tools built to talk to OpenAI-style endpoints to work with it.
NEAR AI Cloud uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to ensure privacy. These TEEs cover three areas: user prompts, model weights, and generated outputs. Each request also comes with a hardware-signed cryptographic attestation confirming the job ran inside a secure environment.
Users can stake NEAR tokens instead of paying with a credit card. The yield from this stake converts into inference credits, which stay intact when the user unstakes. Pricing ranges from $0.15 to $0.50 per million tokens, with output priced higher.