AI-powered developer platform GitHub sees immense potential in India, which is poised to surpass the US in developer population by 2027. CEO Thomas Dohmke spoke to Geetika Srivastava on the sidelines of the annual GitHub Universe conference about the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in coding, the company’s Copilot programme, and GitHub’s journey since it was acquired by Microsoft. Edited excerpts:
Will the emergence of generative AI ever replace computer programmers?
Absolutely not, it can never replace developers. On the one hand, the technology is not sentient, it is not creative. It is not able to make decisions for you and it cannot decide what features one should work on and how to build them. Software development is a very wide space with many individual decisions that need to be made — such as what database needs to be used, which programming language, what Cloud you run on, where you run the service, etc. You need a human, a pilot, in the loop that makes these decisions.
On the other hand, we have so much work that is yet to be done. Many CIOs and CTOs that I meet are frustrated about speed and so they are looking for optimisations to their cost structure. Therefore we have so much innovation to look forward to and I’m not worried at all about developers being replaced by machines. They will be supported by machines and will still have way too much work on their plates.
Do you consider the technology’s emergence as a significant turning point for the GitHub community?
In the last year, with Copilot and ChatGPT, we have already moved past that turning point. It’s become clear that generative AI is here to stay. Efforts behind this technology, the first GPT model, have been made years ago and we built Copilot on top of that. With ChatGPT, we really opened the eyes of the industry and many of our enterprise customers to the fact that generative AI replaces a fundamental hole in their business processes. I believe we are heading into a year where GitHub Copilot will become mainstream.
Earlier this year, GitHub made headlines after it laid off its engineering team in India. What were the reasons behind this and how do you envision your future in the country?
We had to make some hard decisions at the beginning of the year, given the economic environment that sadly affected our team in India. This was not because of their location but because they were working on products that we stopped investing in. The majority of those laid off got hired back into Microsoft, working in Asia. Given the company structure that we have in India, we had to go through this process first and only then could we rehire them into Microsoft, which certainly wasn’t an ideal way and which we are sorry for. We continue to be very excited about the Indian market and we do have a team in India covering the market there.
There are 13 million developers in India, and our growth rate in the country is 36%. It’s the second-largest developer community for us, and we look forward to it being the largest by 2027. We see a lot of scope in the market.
The tech space is controlled by a lot of big firms. Does this act as an impediment for new players to grow?
I believe this is an opportunity for start-ups to rise. I don’t think the big companies that the tech industry has had for many years act as an impediment for new ones to rise. OpenAI is not owned by Microsoft and is one such start-up that’s dominating the news now.
Microsoft can learn a lot from start-ups and has done so. Satya (Nadella) and I meet with a lot of start-up CEOs on a regular basis because we can learn from them and see how they are prioritising their work. The tech industry is not one where there is just one winner and everyone else loses. There are always battles between players but in the end, all these companies survive in a gigantic market of consumers that are willing to try their products. Just look at the Indian market, there’s a bunch of large companies that are very specific to their markets but are selling software worth billions of dollars every year.
It’s been 5 years since Microsoft acquired GitHub. How have things been so far and what kind of technology from Microsoft are you leveraging to make your products better?
A lot of things have changed. GitHub has grown exponentially, and has leveraged the Microsoft ecosystem to support its growth. Copilot is the perfect example of GitHub benefiting from the acquisition. Microsoft is accelerating GitHub, working very closely with teams in Asia as well as those who provide the OpenAI API to build Copilot on top of it. We were able to get early access to the technology only because of Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI. We are also leveraging all the experience that Microsoft has collected over the last decade on responsible, ethical and secure AI. There are a lot of security compliance requirements that come from our large enterprise customers that Microsoft has been able to help with.
We also leverage Microsoft’s sales engine around the world. It has sellers in effectively every country, including India and APAC. The Microsoft machine is helping us close deals with customers. On the legal side, whenever there is a third-party claim against content generated by Copilot, Microsoft will defend those claims.
How is GitHub doing financially? How has the user base grown so far?
We couldn’t be happier about the growth trajectory of GitHub ever since Microsoft acquired it. We have passed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue run rate and we are delighted with the growth rate since then. Our user base has grown significantly; we reached 100 million users earlier this year in February. When the company was acquired in 2018, the number was 27.5 million users.