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GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

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Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#151

Post by winfredJa »

malfist wrote: post #145
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are slowly inching closer to the point where AI and AI products will be billed for what they cost. I suspect the API prices are already served with profitable unit economics. The SOTA API prices are much higher than the costs for other providers to run very large open weight models. The monthly subscription plans were being offered at a discount to generate interest in these models. We're not entering a period o…

> I suspect the API prices are already served at prices with profitable unit economics. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

Mr.Truth-teller Amodei confirmed it that APIs are profitable at Anthropic.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#152

Post by speedgoose »

malfist wrote: post #145
Aurornis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are slowly inching closer to the point where AI and AI products will be billed for what they cost. I suspect the API prices are already served with profitable unit economics. The SOTA API prices are much higher than the costs for other providers to run very large open weight models. The monthly subscription plans were being offered at a discount to generate interest in these models. We're not entering a period o…

> I suspect the API prices are already served at prices with profitable unit economics. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

We don’t know the models sizes, requirements, and optimisations, but we could take a guess using the infrastructure costs of the largest open weight alternatives that perform slightly worse.

In my opinion, it’s a profitable kind of service. They probably don’t pay the public prices for the cloud GPUs though.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#153

Post by legulere »

Aurornis wrote: post #140
ericmcer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already bafflingly expensive. I interviewed at a place recently where they said the average dev was hitting $2k/mo in Claude code costs. That is no longer a helpful tool... it costs like ~15% of an actual dev. Even if it is helping, is it actually... making things better or building anything truly important? The issue seems way too nuanced to spend $2k/mo. Not to mention the entire tech industry floats on hype…

> That is no longer a helpful tool... it costs like ~15% of an actual dev. The full cost of each employee is more than their salary. The common estimate is 1.4X their salary due to all of the employer-paid taxes, benefits, and other things. So even $2K/month of token costs would only be around 10% of the cost of a mid-range developer cost. It doesn't have to increase productivity much to justify the cost.

Don't forget the organisational overhead. You'll need managers and communication overhead between developers grows superlinear (see Brook's law).

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#154

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

winfredJa wrote: post #151
malfist wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect the API prices are already served at prices with profitable unit economics. There is absolutely no evidence to support this.

Mr.Truth-teller Amodei confirmed it that APIs are profitable at Anthropic.

He didn't, he talked very carefully in hypotheticals.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#155

Post by psalaun »

grumple wrote: post #130
tuo-lei wrote: post #74

is there any data on how many Actions minutes a single copilot review actually takes? the announcement doesn't mention it, and for a team doing 20+ PRs a day that number adds up fast.

I have noticed “running for x minutes” while it’s doing the review, but I can’t see it on completed reviews. Definitely mysterious.

You can check in the Actions tab of the repository. For our 300k LoC codebase, it's between 5 and 10 min per review

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#156

Post by dijit »

Laughsalot wrote: post #76
2ndorderthought wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we assume us providers aren't doing the same? Also all the Chinese providers are giving open weight models. Many you can run locally. I don't see the risk. If your code is easily AI generated you don't have a moat anyways. A Chinese competitor probably won't have as easy of a time as a US one of you operate in the US

The US has robust IP and trademark law that allows companies some amount of chance to find a legal remedy to anyone who clones their business. China is notorious for protecting local companies from foreign IP suits. Further, at a lot of companies, the risk has to be acceptable to shareholders and auditors. Perceived risk is often a more powerful motivator than actual risk.

I don't think that's as true as you think it is.

I mean, "Copyright Infringement" famously does not translate to Mandarin; but we have Amazon ripping off best sellers in their marketplace pretty brazenly and Apple "sherlocking" applications -- that's even where the term comes from.

The models themselves are trained on a corpus of material that was obtained with dubious legality... though I suppose some argument could be made that they're forced to bend the models because of that.

I'd be more wary of these models terms and conditions granting a license to themselves for everything they come into contact with: nobody is reading these licenses it seems. Copilots old one only allowed for "being inspired" by the output, despite they themselves producing an IDE of some kind which allowed you to make complete projects from suggestions: directly breaking their own T&C's.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#157

Post by Silhouette »

Aurornis wrote: post #140
ericmcer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already bafflingly expensive. I interviewed at a place recently where they said the average dev was hitting $2k/mo in Claude code costs. That is no longer a helpful tool... it costs like ~15% of an actual dev. Even if it is helping, is it actually... making things better or building anything truly important? The issue seems way too nuanced to spend $2k/mo. Not to mention the entire tech industry floats on hype…

> That is no longer a helpful tool... it costs like ~15% of an actual dev. The full cost of each employee is more than their salary. The common estimate is 1.4X their salary due to all of the employer-paid taxes, benefits, and other things. So even $2K/month of token costs would only be around 10% of the cost of a mid-range developer cost. It doesn't have to increase productivity much to justify the cost.

The arithmetic is a little different in every country because of local rates of pay and taxation but it's worth remembering that in most of the world except for the richer parts of the US developers do not get paid what those US developers have been making in recent years. There are a few exceptions but the norm is several times less even in major economies in Europe or Asia.

Another challenge for US tech companies is that - if you'll forgive the bluntness - their "brand" is now toxic in most of the world. Almost everyone is trying to distance themselves from US tech as fast as they can. Governments and big businesses are starting to invest seriously in alternative solutions and local resources. It will happen over time but I don't see much the US tech companies or the US government can do to stop the train now the wheels are turning.

So there's a serious risk for US tech companies now of a double whammy where their already relatively high R&D costs increase even further and yet they're also facing much stronger competition in international markets or maybe even excluded from some of those markets entirely.

If we also reach the seemingly inevitable point that "capable enough" LLMs can run locally - or at least as a private resource provided internally by large organisations - there is very little moat left to protect not only US Big Tech whose stocks have been heavily driven by expected returns from AI but the whole US tech industry that is banking on productivity gains from that AI tech. Then they also won't be able to capture most of the entire global supply of components like GPUs/RAM/SSDs because it won't be cost effective any more - and that is one of the few practical moats they have built (however accidentally) that would be a significant barrier to direct competitors setting up shop in places like Europe and Asia.

It's going to be interesting to see how US tech companies respond to these effects over the next 5-10 years. The giants are all aboard the AI train and can't back down now so there will probably be some casualties there if - as again seems inevitable - the bubble bursts at some point. But then there's a very long tail of still very successful US tech companies that might be paying US salaries and using AI-based tools but aren't themselves focussed on developing or providing those AI-based tools and they're the ones who are going to need to find new ways to compete effectively within that kind of time frame.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#158

Post by XCSme »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #122

We are slowly inching closer to the point where AI and AI products will be billed for what they cost. We are currently living in the heavily discounted world where everything subsidized to the point where a lot of it is free. It seems like they can't or won't keep that up anymore. My prediction is that whenever one of the big companies raise their prices or move features to higher tiers others will follow soon. They…

But with new hardware comping out, and maybe models being smart enough to help with optimizing them and reducing inference costs even more, I think we should still expect the costs to go down.

Re: GitHub Copilot code review will start consuming GitHub Actions minutes

#159

Post by dijit »

maccard wrote: post #127
infecto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fair but inversely we do many builds throughout the day most business days and have not had an impact where we noticed it. Could also be that we deploy often and frequently and have setup our builds to be as quick as possible so any issues would likely go unnoticed.

Yeah totally. We use GitHub + actions for backend, and self host Perforce + TeamCity for our main game codebase. We had 0 downtime in 12 months on our TC as a comparison. I know there’s a difference between running an internal service and developing a global scale platform that is abused, but as a user I don’t care about those concerns, I care about the platform being up!

"You can't possibly hope to have as many resources caring about uptime as $provider, you should outsource to them"

"Give $provider a break, they have such crazy scale that they can't possibly hope to have great uptime"

... yet it very rapidly gets lower uptime than a service running on a desktop in the corner of the office with some backups that get restored somewhere else.

Most sysadmins will tell you tales of laptops with a decade of uptime hosting simple services that nobody cared about (IRC, ticket software) with no downtime, not even an hour, and people only discovered that fact when they decided it was too slow and it's time to migrate.. These services have become less reliable than that, and servers themselves have only gotten more reliable in that time..

(yes, I'm aware of the security liability of decades old software running, even if it's not accessible by everyone)

There's a weird doublethink going on.

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