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

thurrott.com

201–210 of 214 posts

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

#201
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?

OpenAI is amassing an ungodly amount of though, there’s efficiency efforts that have been made for sure but scooping all that data up is what they need to train for gpt5. Those chat logs are worth their proverbial weight in gold.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you live around the bay area where you get paid absurd money by the hour for a job that can be done overseas for 10 bucks, outside or the rest of the world that 100 usd is per week tops, thats way too much i would pay for service that only barely helps my in my day to day... If you need to constantly use chatgpt/copilot to do your job properly, maybe its time to learn something else because your job will be…

Does it barely help you, or can it completely automate your job? You can't have it both ways. I find it hard to believe there is a scenario where it actually helps you, but only provides $5 of value in a month. What exact kind help is that? If it is able to provide $5 in help, you could likely scale that to $20.

are we talking about copilot or chatgpt? chatgpt4 provides more value than copilot since i can use it for other things, copilot is just for "code" and doesn't provide any value other than autocomplete prediction to me...

Maybe if you are website designer... ohh m sorry i should say the modern way website designers call themselves today "frontend engineer", maybe if you are a designer it could help you with all the boilerplate your react/astro/svelte requires just to add a with two columns.

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

#203

The moment I can train Copilot on my codebase and improve its predictions, I’d gladly pay more than $20. Even now, I find that I can’t live without it simply as a slightly more intelligent auto-complete.

Check out https://cursor.so - It does this pretty well without requiring much setup.

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

#204
When I first used copilot a few months after it came out, I thought it was wildly undervalued—I’d pay $100/m for the value and time saved.

It’s become such an integral part of my workflow, that until Zed got Copilot integration I couldn’t switch to it.

Of course I’d prefer to continue paying $10 a month.

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

#205
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, just like "crypto" before that, and "big data" before that and "social media presence" before that and so on and so forth...

And "on the internet" before that. Which eventually happened, but the crash of 2002 happened between.

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

#207
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.

I disagree. I have both but I use Copilot a lot more. Editing the results of ChatGPT takes as long as it would take for me to write the code myself. Whereas Copilot is autocomplete, you can choose whether to accept it or not line by line.

Are you using ChatGPT 4 or 3.5? GPT 4 is phenomenal.

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

#208

FWIW, a GitHub employee just said on stage at the AI Engineer Summit that this claim is "not true" and that it's a roughly $100m ARR product (first keynote speaker in this stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw4PrtyvJI0 )

Revenue != profit

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I have both but I use Copilot a lot more. Editing the results of ChatGPT takes as long as it would take for me to write the code myself. Whereas Copilot is autocomplete, you can choose whether to accept it or not line by line.

Are you using ChatGPT 4 or 3.5? GPT 4 is phenomenal.

How are you prompting ChatGPT such that you get useful results in a real world code base? It doesn’t have any context. The context is what makes Copilot work.

By default, ChatGPT can only give a generic answer. Do you just paste the entire file in there?

For example let’s say I want to write a function foo() that calls functions bar() and baz() defined in the same file and uses a library Y that I already imported. If I just write the name of the function, Copilot will often autocomplete a reasonable body for me. If I wanted to use ChatGPT then I would have to first tell it about foo() and bar() and the dependency on Y, and by the time I’ve finished telling it about all of that I could have written the function by hand twice over.

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

#210

FWIW, a GitHub employee just said on stage at the AI Engineer Summit that this claim is "not true" and that it's a roughly $100m ARR product (first keynote speaker in this stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw4PrtyvJI0 )

Revenue != profit

Correct, but he also explicitly said the reports that it was losing money were "not true". Given that he's a VP at GitHub, I would consider him to be more authoritative on the matter than the WSJ's "multiple sources."
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