Losses at Microsoft's GitHub Seem to be Deepening
Some years ago it was reported in the mainstream media that for every GitHub user (used by Microsoft) that decided to use its plagiarism engine (and paid for this plagiarism "privilege") Microsoft was losing $200 (per user).
That was after GitHub had lost billions. It was already lacking a business model, it reported indefinite office shutdowns, and it regularly revealed mass layoffs.
Like LinkedIn, it's just a sinkhole for "investment", it's not working out and will never work out. Those are good at losing money and boasting about "engagement".
GitHub never made money, so Microsoft shelved it or sank it into the slop bucket last summer ("CoreAI")
And inside "CoreAI" the chief of GitHub quit the company a few months ago, so something clearly isn't going well.
How much money is Microsoft willing to lose just to control the opposition (developers whose projects compete with Microsoft)?
Trying to push slop "bug reports" only vexes users and irritates developers. There's nothing to gain from false positives.
As it turns out, as Microsoft's debt soars, it now wants to limit its losses (at least by just a bit) by placing further restrictions on use.
Developers notice this and cancel! Or as one report put it some hours ago:
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, one of the most widely used AI coding tools, could potentially become costlier for many developers as the tech giant explores new pricing structures tied to usage.
The Windows-maker is set to switch its billing system for GitHub Copilot from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system, according to a report by TechCrunch. This means that users will be charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of a low flat rate based on requests.
In recent months many developers and projects quit GitHub. The above is part of a trend. Developers have truly turned against this platform. Now it's "cool" to dump it.
Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub is a trap) aside, there are also legal costs because a plagiarism engine is not a settled matter.
How much money has Microsoft already lost on this terrible thing that's associated with fraud at Microsoft [1, 2]? How much more is Microsoft willing to lose?
"I'm not sure," an associate has noted, "as I am not sure of how tokens get wasted and how many are actually wasting money on wasting tokens and in what capacity. I haven't used any of the LLMs and don't plan on it."
Developers can very easily lose their skills if they let LLMs spew out code. How does this benefit anybody? Debugging flawed 'code' (slop) instead of doing it right in the first place will simply not contribute anything to the basic development/refinement of coding skills. No maturity.
"There's enough in the daily Links," the associate has added, "to question the mental facilities of those who do, unless they are under threat to do so by their employers."
I heard from several people who use LLMs for code. All of them: 1) are forced to do so by their employers; 2) are not happy to do so.
This means that LLMs for code mostly target clueless managers, not actual programmers "and their employers are not seeing a ROI on token expenditures," the associate has concluded.
How many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost by betting on the false prediction that it can somehow "monetise" public code by LLMs? █