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

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

#151

Post by outside1234 »

treis wrote: post #149
_cenw wrote: post #139

If Copilot loses this much, just imagine how much OpenAI is losing on non-paying users using ChatGPT. Who's gonna pay for this as soon as the VC money runs out?

They just need to keep it going until GPUs get cheaper. The point is to build/protect the monopoly until that happens. Then costs come down and they start printing an absurd amount of money.

The problem is that they don't have a monopoly. Not hard to see how CodeLlama and other future open source models can't stand-in here for GPT-4 at dramatically lower cost.

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

#152

Post by toomuchtodo »

_cenw wrote: post #139

If Copilot loses this much, just imagine how much OpenAI is losing on non-paying users using ChatGPT. Who's gonna pay for this as soon as the VC money runs out?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-owner-openai-is-e... (ChatGPT-owner OpenAI is exploring making its own AI chips)

They are proving the market to generate demand to invest to vertically integrate, which then drives down costs while revenue remains flat or (hopefully) increases.

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

#153

Post by vineyardmike »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #150
treis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just need to keep it going until GPUs get cheaper. The point is to build/protect the monopoly until that happens. Then costs come down and they start printing an absurd amount of money.

well, and straight caching. If they know that 80% of people ask the same 10,000 questions without a back and forth dialogue, it's not hard to just write a front end for that.

This problem won’t work for code assistants. No way those queries have high repetition. Not when you’re uploading user files.

I assume the best strategy is to shrink the models and tune them more.

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

#154

Post by baz00 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #49

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.

They do suck unconditionally. They're like having a mediocre person working with you that you have to verify and validate all the time that sucks up a ton of money and electricity and generally does bad things to the environment.

Edit: I haven't even started on the social and political impact this has either.

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

#155

Post by JohnBooty »

marcosdumay wrote: post #95
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.…

> 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.

Are we talking about Copilot in particular or AI code assistants in general?

The value, for me, is extremely high.

My teammates feel the same. Our shared opinion/experience is that ChatGPT 4 is better than Copilot in general but Copilot shines in-editor because it's aware of your project. So we use both in tandem. They mostly use Chat GPT and I split about 50%/50%. (Note: I'm using the Copilot X beta which I believe uses GPT-4)

People say they're "only good for boilerplate code" but well, that's the vast majority of what anybody is writing IMO.

If I need to traverse a tree or list or something, I'm letting AI write that code. Could I write it myself faster? No, and it's going to have an off-by-one error some non-zero portion of the time if I write it. I also find it's superior to e.g. memorizing all 10,000 CSS properties along with all the classes that pertain to Boostrap or Tailwind or whatever.

I see the AI code assistant hate here and it just baffles me. It's so obviously useful to me, and I really can't imagine I'm that atypical.

Edit 1: AI help is especially pertinent if you are a "full stack coder" who is working on everything from database to frontend. Since frontends really multiplied in complexity about 15 years ago, I have not met a single "full stack engineer" who is truly fluent and expert in the entire db->app->frontend stack, because complexity and choice has proliferated at each of those levels.

Edit 2: While most of us are (hopefully) not literally writing tree or list traversals by hand in our actual daily programming lives, I hope my meaning is still clear -- I'm talking about that mundane sort of code, iterating over things, etc.

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

#156

Post by daft_pink »

jrockway wrote: post #127
daft_pink wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm probably not using it to the fullest. I mostly use it for boilerplate that I know it's good at, like `// Write a function to run the cpu profiler for 30 seconds and write the result to the filename in variable "foo"`. But I guess if it knows your codebase, then you can say `// Write a test to ensure that Foo accepts a nil FooRequest.` or something. I should figure out how to set that up. All in all it saves me a…

You should try it on vscode for a moment or try to find a plugin for emacs.

I'm often writing legal rules in code and from the name of my function, it predicts the way the law is written. It's pretty incredible how well it works. Clearly it's just stealing someone else's work from github, but the autocomplete is very awesome.

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

#157

Post by dragontamer »

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 is 8. I was mistaken earlier.

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

#158

Post by treis »

outside1234 wrote: post #151
treis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just need to keep it going until GPUs get cheaper. The point is to build/protect the monopoly until that happens. Then costs come down and they start printing an absurd amount of money.

The problem is that they don't have a monopoly. Not hard to see how CodeLlama and other future open source models can't stand-in here for GPT-4 at dramatically lower cost.

Maybe but that's the bet. And for almost all software it's turned out to be true

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

#159

Post by jpallen »

A lot of people are commenting about how gpt4 is better than copilot, both in terms of getting it to do exactly what you want and in the quality of response. I've also found this and so I wrote a simple VS Code coding assistant that uses gpt4 and let's you be direct in asking what you want it to do: https://github.com/jpallen/biggles. Maybe it can be useful to some of you too.

It also supports voice, which is a fun way to code!

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

#160

Post by adam_arthur »

_cenw wrote: post #139

If Copilot loses this much, just imagine how much OpenAI is losing on non-paying users using ChatGPT. Who's gonna pay for this as soon as the VC money runs out?

I suspect many would pay far higher than $20/month to use an intelligent LLM. Just that too many players are subsidizing free use so its non-competitive to charge that much.

Eventually reality will force cost to the consumer towards cost of serving. Cost of serving LLMs will decline alongside this, so maybe the magic number stays at $20

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