Microsoft's AI coding tool GitHub Copilot hits 20 million users
Microsoft also reported that GitHub Copilot is among the most popular AI coding tools offered today and is used by 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies. They also added that the product's growth among enterprises as their customers has risen by 75 per cent in comparison to their last quarter.
In their previous quarter, they reported that their all-time users were 15 million, which indicates that over five million people tried GitHub in the last three months. Microsoft and GitHub don't display figures for many of the 20 million users who continue to use this AI coding tool daily.
Nadella also mentioned that GitHub Copilot was a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018. In the year since, it seems GitHub Copilot's growth rate has continued in a positive direction. And AI coding tools are rising in popularity, and they seem to be one of the few AI products generating notable revenue.
Compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, that has a user base of a hundred million users, on the contrary, these AI coding tools might have a tiny user base. The only reason is quite simple: software engineering is more niche compared to general information queries.
Software engineers and their employers seem to be paying a premium for AI coding tools to increase their productivity and efficiency. Microsoft's long list of enterprise customers and GitHub are attracting this community of code developers. GitHub has positioned itself well to dominate the market for AI coding tools.
Another well-known AI coding tool, Cursor, has been acquiring expertise from upstart AI businesses to compete with GitHub Copilot in the enterprise market. In March, reports from Bloomberg claimed that over a million people were using Cursor's software daily. The company's annualised recurring revenue at the time was around $200 million. The fact that Cursor's ARR is over $500 million today indicates that a lot more people are using its goods daily.
Initially, both these AI coding tool companies were developing different tools to tackle different developers, but with the passing of time, they have started to converge into similar product development.
Their current biggest similarity is launching AI agents to review code and catch bugs that have been written or developed by Humans. And now both GitHub and Cursors' next goals are creating AI agents that create automated programmer workflows, which helps the developers drop all the tasks together. And Microsoft's CEO also added that GitHub was seeing great momentum with their AI coding agents.
Cursor is not the only competitor in the market for GitHub; the other well-capitalised competitors are also creating a dent in the AI coding tools market.
And in recent times, Google has bought the founders of the AI coding business Windsurf, and Cognition, which created Devin and later bought the rest of Windsurf's staff. Not to add that to capture the market, OpenAI and Anthropic are developing their own AI coding products using internal AI models, Codex and Claude Code, respectively.
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Indian Express
12 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Saint, Satan, Sam: Chat about the ChatGPT Man
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To many others, he is a cunning, manipulative person who uses his marketing skills to raise money and is actually destroying the planet. The truth might be somewhere between those two extremes. By some literary coincidence, two books have recently been released on Sam Altman, and are shooting up the bestseller charts. Both are superbly written and researched (based on interviews with hundreds of people), and while they start at almost the same point, they not surprisingly come to rather different conclusions about the man and his work. Those who tend to see Altman as a well-meaning, if occasionally odd, genius will love Keach Hagey's The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. Hagey is a Wall Street Journal reporter and while she does not put a halo around Altman, her take on the OpenAI CEO reflects the title of the book – she sees Altman as a visionary who is trying to change the world. The fact that Altman collaborated on the book (although he is believed to have thought he was too young for a biography) might have something to do with this, for the book does articulate Altman's vision on a variety of subjects, but most of all, on AI and where it is headed. Although it begins with the events leading up to Altman's being dramatically sacked as the CEO of OpenAI in November 2023, and his equally dramatic reinstatement within days, Hagey's book is a classic biography. It walks us through Altman's childhood, his getting interested in coding and then his decision to drop out from Stanford, before getting into tech CEO mode by first founding social media app Loopt and then joining tech incubator Y Combinator (which was behind the likes of Stripe, Airbnb and Dropbox) after meeting its co-founder Paul Graham, who is believed to have a profound impact on him (Hagey calls him 'his mentor'). 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Some might call it too dark, but her research and interviews across different countries cannot be faulted. It would be excessively naive to believe either book as the absolute truth on Altman in particular and OpenAI and AI in general, but they are both must-reads for any person who wants a complete picture of the AI revolution and its biggest brand and face. Mind you, it is a picture that is still in the process of being painted. AI is still in its infancy, and Altman turned forty in April. But as these two excellent books prove, neither is too young to be written about, while definitely being relevant enough to be read about.
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Business Standard
12 minutes ago
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Validation, loneliness, insecurity: Why young people are turning to ChatGPT
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Economic Times
12 minutes ago
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‘I feel useless': ChatGPT-5 is so smart, it has spooked Sam Altman, the man who started the AI boom
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Until that changes, our most vulnerable systems and the people who depend on them will remain exposed.'Not everyone is convinced by Altman's remarks. Some see them as clever marketing. But his past record and unfiltered tone suggest genuine might be OpenAI's most ambitious release yet. It could also be a signpost for the world to stop, look around, and ask itself what kind of intelligence it really wants to build — and how much control it's willing to give up.
