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GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

thurrott.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#41

Post by uxp8u61q »

bhouston wrote: post #36
LeicaLatte wrote: post #26

GitHub’s CoPilot is the most disappointing of AI products out there.

For some developers for sure, but not all. I am a senior developer with +20 years of experience and I find Github Copilot amazing. It significantly boosts my productivity. I do not expect the world from it, and I do run into limitations, but it helps me tremendously to be productive in languages and tools which I have low/no familiarity. I think Github Copilot paired with ChatGPT fails the most in idiosyncratic code…

It's also amazing to write documentation or unit tests. Or repetitive editing tasks that are hard to automate (e.g. "invert this if condition").

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#42

Post by insanitybit »

bhouston wrote: post #33

Thus, the price of Github Copilot is going to go up, 2x to 5x. For all of the criticism of Github Copilot, for a lot of developers (but not all), the value Github Copilot is incredibly high, much more than $20/month. The current rock bottom pricing is low compared to the value provided for those users. As such there is a big opportunity to multiply the price here being charged. Probably an increase between 3x to 5x.…

I'd probably pay ~2-3x, idk about 5x. I'd consider it though. Hopefully they can cut the costs and meet in the middle.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#43

Post by bhouston »

insanitybit wrote: post #42
bhouston wrote: post #33

Thus, the price of Github Copilot is going to go up, 2x to 5x. For all of the criticism of Github Copilot, for a lot of developers (but not all), the value Github Copilot is incredibly high, much more than $20/month. The current rock bottom pricing is low compared to the value provided for those users. As such there is a big opportunity to multiply the price here being charged. Probably an increase between 3x to 5x.…

I'd probably pay ~2-3x, idk about 5x. I'd consider it though. Hopefully they can cut the costs and meet in the middle.

At some point, the open source models you can run locally are going to start to get competitive. I suspect the cost problem came from upgrading to ChatGPT 4 over ChatGPT 3 - right there their costs more than 5x.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#44

Post by tkellogg »

LeicaLatte wrote: post #26

GitHub’s CoPilot is the most disappointing of AI products out there.

imo it's the form factor that works. ChatGPT is good for doing standalone things like generating a script. CoPilot is good for making incremental changes to an existing code base. Honestly, its REALLY good at it. One of my favorite parts is that it mimics the style of the surrounding code.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#45

Post by insanitybit »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #41
bhouston wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some developers for sure, but not all. I am a senior developer with +20 years of experience and I find Github Copilot amazing. It significantly boosts my productivity. I do not expect the world from it, and I do run into limitations, but it helps me tremendously to be productive in languages and tools which I have low/no familiarity. I think Github Copilot paired with ChatGPT fails the most in idiosyncratic code…

It's also amazing to write documentation or unit tests. Or repetitive editing tasks that are hard to automate (e.g. "invert this if condition").

> or unit tests

Seriously! I write a documentation comment like:

    /// Given: blah
    /// When: blah
    /// Then: blah
and Copilot writes the test for me. I can generate a dozen tests like this and it's awesome. I write a lot more tests because of Copilot.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#46

Post by bhouston »

tedivm wrote: post #13
linuxftw wrote: post #6

Copilot is useless compared to chat-gpt4. There's really no comparison. As far as the costs, it seems like transmitting things repeatedly would be more expensive than the chat model where you just transmit things when you want them.

Copilot is chat gpt4, and has been since roughly April. It's built on top of it.

I suspect the cost problem arose specifically upgrading to ChatGPT 4 over ChatGPT 3 - right there their costs increased more than 5x. So before it was likely under $5/month on average, but once you changed to ChatGPT 4, it jumped to like $20/month on average.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#47

Post by insanitybit »

noodlesUK wrote: post #20

I feel like the centralisation of server resources for something like copilot doesn’t really make sense. Many (most) professional developers are working on beefy laptops. If ever there were a case to run these models client side, a software developer’s laptop is probably the ideal place. What are the specs that are needed to run inference on these models?

I don't think most dev laptops have 8GB+ of GPU memory, which (based on ollama requirements) seems like it's on the low-mid end of the requirements. I've tried experimenting with some local models and:

a) They're much slower on my 6GB laptop GPU

b) The seem to not be as good, functionally

b) I can't make use of larger models

I haven't done more than just some experimentation but I can see how this would make sense to put on a server.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#49

Post by bryanlarsen »

AI is such a huge expectations dichotomy. For those of us used to the continual disappointment that pre-LLM AI was, the current crop of LLM's are amazing, mind blowing things. We start raving about them, so other people take a look expecting that modern LLM's are the greatest thing since sliced bread. They're not quite that, so we get HN comments complaining that AI sucks.

Re: GitHub Copilot loses an average of $20 per user per month

#50

Post by uxp8u61q »

dmurray wrote: post #30
dragontamer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs are a SIMD architecture designed for 4x4 float32 matrix multiplications found in video games. But NPUs (like Googles NPU) are systolic arrays designed for 16x16 or even 256x256 float16 or even int8 matrix multiplications instead. ------- NVidia builds larger matrix multiplications out of the 4x4 float16 base that a SM is designed for. After all, a 8x8 matrix multiplication is just four of the smaller 4x4 matrix…

> After all, a 8x8 matrix multiplication is just four of the smaller 4x4 matrix multiplications Isn't it 8 of them? That's why you can't go the other way around and use your 8x8 multiplier to efficiently multiply 4x4s in parallel.

Yes, it's eight multiplication with the naive algorithm. You can get to seven with a clever trick (Strassen's algorithm). As far as I'm aware, with these precise numbers (8x8 matrix decomposed into four 4x4) it's unknown if we can do better.
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