Live data from Hacker News

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

thurrott.com

111–120 of 214 posts

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

#111

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?

The secondary problem to the high resource requirements, is that I think once you ship the model people can just basically pirate it right?

I’d be surprised to see the models go the ground breaking commercial AIs shipping but then I’m surprised at how much we’ve gotten open source anyway.

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

#112

Doesn't copilot slurp up oodles of the code in your workspace for non corporate accounts? Is that data acquisition maybe worth the cost to Microsoft? I know they have github, but tiny scripting glue tasks like copilot excels at aren't the best represented on GitHub.

I use Copilot in Emacs and it doesn't send Github any data other than my prompt.

Do you specifically activate it?

The main functionality I get out of copilot in vscode is autocomplete on steroids, so it's getting all code as I write it. I don't use the question based generator most of the time.

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

#113

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.

> We start raving about them, so other people take a look expecting… If that’s what you want to call it. I see hypemen overpromising and product underdelivering. And when pressed about specifics, attempts to drown queries in jargon or an ass-covering retreat to treating it like it’s just a tech demo not intended to be used for anything ever.

And management consultants solving every problem in the world by adding a “AI” box in their powerpoint flow diagram.

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

#115

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.…

Mark my words, developers will soon pay $5k per month for access to GPT-7 Copilot.

Marked. Mark my reply: No, they won't.

For score keeping, let's define "soon". Does "by the end of 2025" sound reasonable?

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

#116
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a lot of developers (but not all), the value Github Copilot is incredibly high, much more than $20/month. I really doubt this. IMO, the jury is still out deciding if the value is above zero for enough people to matter.

From that article: 1.5m users and up to 50% of their code is now being produced by Copilot. Sounds to me like the verdict on its value is in already.

They don't give any source or anything; the way it's worded sounds ambiguous enough that I suspect it's not that 50% of their code is generated by Copilot. Is there something a bit more convincing elsewhere?

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

#117
post #13
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.

It's not. Copilot is based on GPT-3

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

#119
post #75
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that actually true? I remember Copilot-X being containing the GPT4 version and I'm pretty sure that wasn't out back in April. I don't even think it was out this summer

X also isn't GPT-4 but the previous cheaper model

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

#120
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a lot of developers (but not all), the value Github Copilot is incredibly high, much more than $20/month. I really doubt this. IMO, the jury is still out deciding if the value is above zero for enough people to matter.

From that article: 1.5m users and up to 50% of their code is now being produced by Copilot. Sounds to me like the verdict on its value is in already.

Having used Copilot for a year now I very much doubt this figure. In my experience it only works well in boilerplate kind of situations where most code is copy/paste work anyhow. As soon as the code gets a little complicated it stops working well. It has also gotten quite slow for me lately. So I doubt it increases my work efficiency by more than 5%, but I do like it for reducing strain on the hands. For that I find the price appropriate.
Post reply on HN