India is set to surpass the United States in terms of its total developer population by 2027, according to a recent forecast by Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub. The country currently is the second-biggest contributor to AI projects on the platform globally, with over 13.2 million Indian developers, of which 3.5 million were added this year alone.
The numbers were released as a part of GitHub’s State of the Octoverse report, which was published on the sidelines of the GitHub Universe developer conference in San Francisco. Sharryn Napier, vice-president of APAC at GitHub, said, “It’s exciting to see Indian developers making significant contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub, highlighting India’s growing significance in the AI landscape. The country’s influence extends far beyond creating competitive global enterprises; it’s impacting the future of technology and society as a whole.”
At the conference, which revolved around the application of artificial intelligence in coding and for cybersecurity, the company announced the general availability of GitHub Copilot Chat and previewed its new GitHub Copilot Enterprise offering, new AI-powered security features, and the GitHub Copilot Partner Programme.
“GitHub has taken Microsoft to another level. We are at this important moment with Copilot and AI, ready for the next phase of our development journey,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft at the opening keynote.
Among the most significant new roll outs was Copilot Chat, which will now be generally available across geographies starting December this year and will be powered by GPT 4, and will be at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects. “This will enable the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language,” the company said in a release.
GitHub is also culminating the entirety of its Copilot offerings and personalising them with the full context of a developer’s entire codebase with GitHub Copilot Enterprise. This allows developers to quickly get up to speed on their codebase, search through and build documentation, get suggestions based on internal and private code, and quickly review pull requests. It will be made generally available in February 2024 at $39 per user per month.
As of 2023, the platform is generating an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion with an estimated 100 million developers across the globe.