Microsoft is reportedly losing huge amounts of money on GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot has reportedly cost Microsoft up to $80 per user per month in some cases as the company struggles to make its AI assistant turn a profit.
According to a Wall Street Journal According to the report, the figures reportedly come from an unnamed person familiar with the company who noted that Microsoft’s platform lost an average of $20 per user per month in the first few months of 2023.
It’s unclear whether things have improved since then and the company did not immediately respond to our request for clarification.
GitHub Copilot is a bargain for users
It’s not the first time Microsoft has been investigated for its profitability. In June, unredacted court documents revealed that Azure actually appeared to be remote less profitable then AWS.
GitHub Copilot uses GPT models from OpenAI to solve coding problems. Microsoft famously invested billions in the AI startup and has since gone on to use its models to power countless others AI tools across all its businesses, including Microsoft 365 Copilot office softwarewhich costs users $30 per month – significantly more than office software-only subscriptions without AI assistance.
Artificial intelligence uses models that can process billions of parameters very quickly, but require large amounts of resources for cooling, such as electricity and water. Data centers, already under scrutiny for their environmental impact, are being equipped with more powerful (and expensive) components to handle this.
Several companies have introduced different ways to control spending, including imposing limits on the number of prompts an employee can use in a given month.
But for now, it looks like GitHub Copilot could be heavily underpriced and prove to be good value for money, at least for customers.
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Through Wall Street Journal