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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

#101

Post by [deleted] »

sureglymop wrote: post #85
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 don't think so. It helps increase productivity but it's just too inaccurate and generates too much stupid output. Not that I could do better but it's just not good enough yet.

[deleted]

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

#102

Post by simonw »

_fat_santa wrote: post #91
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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.

I tried Copilot in the early days but stopped using it pretty quickly as it just wasn't that useful in an already established codebase. Often times I'm not writing completely new code but rather implementing a pattern that I've previously defined somewhere else. In this case Copilot just completely falls over because it doesn't know about that existing code. My other gripe is language specific but in VSCode it breaks…

Copilot pulls in similar code from your current project as part of its prompt.

If you understand how it works you can sometimes lay out your code in a way that makes it more likely to include the relevant examples to get the effect that you want.

There is no guidance or documentation for this at all!

I've been running a hack to help me see the prompts in order to better understand what's going on: https://gist.github.com/simonw/30fec0ac20244b4b921532b63b8b0...

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

#103

Post by onionisafruit »

tmikaeld wrote: post #18
tedivm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be fair, before they switched to GPT-4 it was pretty bad..

Interesting that you say that. I had the opposite thought that it doesn’t seem to have improved much over time, but I think my perception might be influenced by my habit of ignoring large suggestions and only looking at the results when it fills the rest of the line I was typing.

I’m also using it with intellij instead of vscode, so for all I know I could be using an old version still.

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

#104

Post by GrinningFool »

_fat_santa wrote: post #91
hesdeadjim wrote: post #5

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.

I tried Copilot in the early days but stopped using it pretty quickly as it just wasn't that useful in an already established codebase. Often times I'm not writing completely new code but rather implementing a pattern that I've previously defined somewhere else. In this case Copilot just completely falls over because it doesn't know about that existing code. My other gripe is language specific but in VSCode it breaks…

Could it be the language and/or the editor's integration?

In neovim w/ a medium-sized go project, I"m finding that it's really good at providing meaningful and at least directionally-accurate contextual suggestions. It seems that the plugin is providing a good bit of context, but maybe the vscode one doesn't?

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

#105

Post by lukeschlather »

finnthehuman wrote: post #69
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.

> 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.

It looks like it's capable of anything, so it's easy to point out that it's pretty bad at certain things, but that's an easy way to miss the things it's actually very good at. Also even if it's bad at most things it's still often good enough to be useful.

And it seems likely that with an order of magnitude better hardware it might be good at some things that it seems really bad at now. So yes, it's a tech demo for a lot of things that aren't quite ready, and it's also very useful as it is.

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

#106

Post by jrockway »

monocasa wrote: post #99

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.

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

#107

Post by Klaus23 »

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 doubt the price will go up that much, if at all. Maybe there will be more expensive tiers, but $20 will probably stay.

Between better quantization, pruning, smaller models through better training/distilling/architecture, hardware price drops and purpose-built hardware, it will probably be much cheaper to run such a model in the future.

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

#108

Post by sebzim4500 »

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 don't see how this can be true. It generates code so much faster than GPT-4 does when you call it through chatgpt.

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

#109

Post by nithril »

refulgentis wrote: post #61
bhouston wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did they? I'm surprised to hear that. Hard to tell for autocomplete of course. For conversational answers, inference speed is _far_ higher than I'm used to from GPT-4, and lower quality. As in, it matches GPT 3.5/ChatGPT.

Not yet, it is still using GPT 3.5. The access to GitHub Copilot X (GPT-4) is in closed beta [1].

[1] https://github.com/features/preview/copilot-x

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

#110

Post by bosie »

baq wrote: post #55
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’m ok to pay for usage privately and my company is ok to pay $100/mo for unlimited (probably, haven’t asked)

100 per developer?
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