Microsoft is reportedly losing lots of money per user on GitHub Copilot

[armchairhacker]

This is bad because it means Microsoft may try to make copilot worse to boost profit.

Like I can see them charge per completion, and charge too much so that it costs $100+/month to run for an average developer. Or crack down on unofficial "copilots" like https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el (although I really doubt more than 1% of completions go to these since they are niche tools; most people are using the official Copilot for VSCode)

It looks like there's a lot of competition though. I'll say right now, if Copilot gets worse and someone has a half-decent open-source alternative, I'll pay a substantial amount (possibly $50+/mo, which is a lot for a grad student), because AI code-completion is that useful

[quantified]

If the productivity boost is so high, what's a good price for it? $100/month might be more than now, but how many paid hours of dev time are saved by it? Asking as a non-user.

[sokoloff]

An interesting possibility is if the cost of generation will go down on something akin to the pace of Moore’s Law, then making $10 of revenue and losing $20 per user per month becomes profitable in a little over 3 years, assuming most of the costs are compute.

Throw in a little efficiency gain and the value of learning about the overall space and I think it’s a wise investment for Microsoft to be going full speed ahead here in order to fight to preserve its long term relevance as a tech leader.

[FuckButtons]

That seems… unlikely given that moores law itself doesn’t really hold any more and the costs involved here are almost entirely incurred in the data center.

[qwytw]

Unless model size/computing cost grows at the same pace or faster. As cool as GPT 3.5 seemed when it came out it's horribly inadequate compared to 4.0 for many use cases so I doubt we'd be content using current models in 3 years.

[Barrin92]

profitability is determined by competition, not by Moore's Law. If the cost of generation goes down prices will go down as service providers battle for users, as they do everywhere else.

And given that the tech itself is rapidly proliferating and effectively just public research and compute, including open source not being far behind, the fact that they're not even making money right now when they do have somewhat of a monopoly is kind of a bad sign.

The much more likely scenario is that these systems will run locally on commodity hardware soon, it'll be free because every large company offers it, and they'll end up slapping ads on it or sell enterprisey stuff to businesses.

[ChatGTP]

Or they blow a bunch of money and we all end up having these running on device for nothing ?

[kromem]

"Microsoft losing lots of money on service massively gathering RLHF on code generation and telemetry which may turn out to eventually replace large swaths of an $80 billion dollar industry"

Fixed the headline for you...

[ss1996]

What is the $80B industry you're talking about?

[WhereIsTheTruth]

How to compete against a company that has infinite amount of cash and is willing to loose an infinite amount of cash?

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Thats why the govt should have broken up Microsoft a long time ago.

[sashank_1509]

Assuming a million users, this is what 20 million? A rounding error to Microsoft. The only question that matters is given enough scale will CoPilot become profitable. My guess is yes, they need to batch thousands of requests and send it through the transformer at the same time to pull down costs. Currently the scale may not be enough but I can imagine it at some point reaching there.

[jerrygoyal]

and copilot isn't that impressive anyway. I use gpt4 for most of my coding queries, wish there was a copilot with gpt4 api.

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe]

Some more discussion over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37821756

[facu17y]

What does that say about OpenAI losing money on ChatGPT Plus esp now with multi-modal which I can only assume is very expensive.

[sp332]

It doesn't say OpenAI is losing money.

[facu17y]

Down-voted because...?

[Suppafly]

Are they losing money or are they spending money to gain market share?

[klysm]

Isn’t that the standard playbook?