GitHub Copilot

“Cursor comes out, and within about a year, it has the majority of the market. Then, by the way, Cloud Code comes out, and then now Cloud Code has majority of the market.”

“Also have now had, now have like a single underlying SDK and harness for our coding agent, you know, co-pilot ultimately the new CLI, the new desktop app, cloud agents that use the same SDK.”

“What we think is that it's not solely about the code generation. It's really about having the ability to use these you know, coding agent brained harnesses or runtimes across, not just. The coding experience where I'm going to like send a bunch of tasks out, o…”

“In 2019, 20, 20 time GPT-II had just been trained. And that was, I think, one of the first language models that came together and was coherent over longer horizons. And there was a variant of GPT-II that that was called Codex. And this is kind of the same name…”

“Cursor has done well at enterprise sales. And enterprise is a very sticky customer and once they adopt something, it has to really fall tremendously behind, perhaps like GitHub Copilot, in order for people to replace it.”

“The other thing I would claim you could see is that CLI-based tools and tools that don't require you to look at the code becoming more popular, and you could see, yeah, various versions of Cloud Code and Codex and Pi and internal development tools taking off e…”

“Copilot has a billion in ARR, I think, at least.”

“Many of these institutions are beginning to adopt products like Cursor or, you know, even GitHub Copilot or a broader ecosystem of kind of AI products in their employee base, and people are seeing the productivity gains.”

“The first time we used the brand codex at OpenAI was actually the model powering GitHub Copilot.”

“One of the things that we are experimenting with this mission control in GitHub Copilot is that, right, which is, well, the idea is you go have five, six different branches in which you fire off all these autonomous agents, they all do their work, they come ba…”

“We will definitely want to build our own, I'll call it, systems of intelligence or AI systems, that is the family of co-pilot, right? Whether it's for information work, that's kind of what we've done for coding or software development, that's the GitHub co-pil…”

“Then seeing the early codecs inside of Copilot, inside of GitHub Copilot, and seeing just the code completions, and seeing it work, that's when I would say we, I felt like I can go from one to 10. Because that was the big call, quite frankly. One was controver…”

“In fact, this is probably the place where that billion to ten billion haven't because in 21 is when I first saw GitHub Copilot.”

“In the enterprise market, I actually think the thing that has most product market fit is like autocomplete. Which is not the sexiest type of AI. So it's not agentic AI. It's like cursor's original product or even co-pilot.”

“By our calculations, Codex, which was the first, this was the first autocomplete model behind GitHub Copilot, it didn't really cost that much money to train, even though, even back then, at kind of the beginning and middle of 2022, people were talking about ho…”

“The first kind of monetized AI app was code, right? It was Copilot, and so Microsoft had invested a ton of money and matured the market with Copilot, with VS Code, and so everybody knew it. It's just, like, the models weren't quite ready then, and so you had, …”

“Last year, it was notable that when we asked, hey, CTOs across 24 portfolio companies how much is AI actually impacting your productivity? And the answer across the board was pretty much 10 to 15%. We're all using GitHub Copilot.”

“If you look at the revenue ARR chart, it's like, Cloud code in, like, three months has surpassed them, and, like, cursor, you know, easily surpassed them, and then, like, even, like, companies like Replin or, like, and Windsurf slash Cognition are, like, gonna…”

“And so it's amazing to see something like cursor overtake market share of something like GitHub co-pilot in nine months or less, right? Like that, that's how fast it happened.”

“And we've been through times where, for example, robotics was one in 2018, where we had a great result, but we kind of realized that actually, like, that we can move so much faster in a different domain, right? That, that actually, you know, we had this great …”

“Last we heard it was at Around half a billion in ARR.”

“There's a report this morning from Copilot where they were estimating the key tabs on amount of code generated by a Copilot that is then left in code repos and checked in. And it's something like 60 to 70%.”

“Once you start using products like this, where in the beginning there's like skepticism, like how, how valuable can it be? And suddenly now like user behavior fundamentally changes so that now when I need to write a function, I'm like documenting my code more …”

“The product is actually one of those products where even use Copilot and use us, it's hard to tell the difference actually. And a lot of our users have actually churned off of Copilot.”

“We are the highest rated developer tool as voted in by developers in the most recent stack overflow survey. And you'll note that this is even higher than tools like chat GPT and GitHub copilot.”

“The first wave of generative AI is what I generally call these text completion products, right? And, you know, that makes a lot of natural sense if you think about it that obviously the interface of a language model is text completion, right? You give it a pre…”

“OpenAI was the first to code, right? With GitHub Copilot. I mean, they provided the weights. As far as I know, and they lost that. And they were first to image with Dali, and they lost that. And they were the first to video with Sora. And as far as I can tell,…”

“We've moved from, you know, GitHub Copilot, which is an auto-complete system, to Cursor, and now things like Windsurf, where, I mean, nearly all of the code is, is written by AI, and the adoption rate within engineering for us is, You know, close to a hundred …”

“We made it mandatory to use at least one AI coding tool, and internally at perplexity it happens to be cursor and like a mix, mix of cursor and GitHub Copilot. But yeah, we definitely made it compulsory.”

“And then it took until cursor for it to really like, I think cursor plus like three, five summit was when it became a thing that was good enough that people were excited about it. And it really ushered in the trend because people were starting to find it more …”

“GitHub Copilot, which I know you just had Thomas on the podcast not too long ago. Four hundred million dollars of ARR, fifteen million developers, very much the steward of this category first mover.”

“And so Copilot does that autocompletion that continues to be the most used features because it is always there.”

“Many of these AI code generation companies that compete with GitHub Copilot are running their inference on Azure AI Foundry.”

“And so this continuous spectrum of, I can assign tasks, test generation, bug fixes, you know, security vulnerabilities bootstrapping a new feature to the coding agent to, I can take that code base into my local IDE, or I can keep working just as I'm used to al…”

“We onboarded all of our engineers to co-pilot and cursor and everything like that. So we got a hundred percent of them onboarded.”

“And I think the, yeah, the idea again is that, you know, code generation as a tool will unlock lot more products. I mean, they're not all competitors to the fact of they're not all kind of you know doing the same job. I think when you're at the end of the day,…”

“And I think companies like Cursor have just done a much better job with that now.”

“The group of people that worked on the first version of Copilot have, by and large, gone on to do other things at other places.”

“AI coding is very clearly in the pragmatists. You know, get up co-pilot now, I don't know, three years old cursor's flying off your shelves, wind service flying off the shelf, you know, replit, all these guys are kind of being, you know, used everywhere. So yo…”

“I think, especially on the VS Code Wars, the switching costs being so low, Is, is going to be a challenge for them. You can go from Copilot to Windsurf to Cursor in like five minutes.”

“The cursors and all that stuff, like you can easily switch to like windsurf and you can switch to this and you can go back to copilot and like, so that revenue could disappear. This is a brand new phenomenon and we do not know how it plays out.”

“But we think, you know in 20, 25, we get into a place where you can assign a GitHub issue, a well-defined GitHub issue to a co-pilot and then it starts creating a draft pull request and it outlines the plan and then it works through its plan and you can, simil…”

“Soon after we launched Copilot Preview it already wrote like, 25% of the code.”

“I think the last number we shared was a few quarters ago, 77,000 organizations using Copilot and back then the number of paid users was 1.8 million paid users.”

“And then we're talking about, you know, 25, 28% productivity gains on, on the end to end 55% or higher on, on the coding task.”

“Github Copilot or Cursor, which are incredible products. We use them internally. We're very happy with them. But again, this is, these are products where the engineer is driving most of the work. Like, even in agent mode, really the engineer is, like, driving …”

“So we built the first sort of co-pilot alternative, essentially.”

“GitHub Copilot was the one product that didn't have super high churn. Obviously that's changed now with things like perplexity and chat GPT and a lot of these apps, but GitHub Copilot was the first canary in the coal mine for these LLMs. These AI systems are r…”

“What I'm really excited about the next generation of Copaldo is transforming into this product that Your grandmother, your child, or you yourself, even if you're not a programmer, can actually interact and create something overall.”

“I was interviewing Nat Freeman today for our internal Vercel podcast today, and he was talking about how much conviction Microsoft got into OpenAI because of the effectiveness of Copilot. Like when Satya saw Copilot, when they were doing the initial iterations…”

“Last year I tweeted out you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify”

“What I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when, you know, we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer.”

“In fact, we talk a lot more about AI scale, but there is not that many hit apps, right? There is ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, there's Copilot, and there's Gemini. I think those are the four. I would say in a DAO, like, is there anything else that comes to your min…”

“Between 38 to 50% Retention for users using Copilot and Enterprise.”

“Step ahead to today, we have 77,000 organizations using GitHub Copilot and almost two million users.”

“A learning for me was that this was the most uncomfortable I think I have been consistently in sales cycles because we had to really lean back on customers and change their thinking about what it meant to adopt an AI product. So don't underestimate the time th…”

“They set up a trial with 450 developers using Copilot actively for a period of time and tested that against a control group of another 200 developers. And at the end, not only, yay, did they buy Copilot and roll it out to thousands of people, but they produced…”

“Yeah, we surveyed the summer 24 founders, and half the batch is using Cursor, compared to only 12% that's using GitHub Copilot.”

“Then we deployed to all, all of our engineering. So everybody's using this daily in their interactions.”

“And our acceptance rate for code suggestions was around 25%, actually over 25%, which is interesting in line with the recent research that GitHub published.”