How does GitHub offer Copilot at only $10/mo?

Question

Running LLMs is expensive. I'm pretty sure if I was paying OpenAI for the API calls to Codex, to get similar functionality to Copilot, I would be paying a lot more than $10 a month.How is GitHub able to offer the service for $10/mo?

muzani · Accepted Answer

Microsoft has a very large investment in OpenAI, and OpenAI runs a lot of their stuff on Azure. GitHub belongs to Microsoft and provides the training data. So they'll likely be charging each other really low costs, for some symbiotic advantage.

wnkrshm · Answer

By using it, you're making their product better, it's in the feeding stage. It generates code, you change the code, the changes get sent back if telemetry is on, it's in the TOS.
To quote: "Code Snippets Data
Depending on your preferred telemetry settings, GitHub Copilot may also collect and retain the following, collectively referred to as “code snippets”: source code that you are editing, related files and other files open in the same IDE or editor, URLs of repositories and files path." [0]
[0] https://github.com/features/copilot/#faq-privacy-copilot-for...

mikewarot · Answer

Tangent: How much compute do you really think happens per API call? CPU hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds?

ipaddr · Answer

Bulk purchaser getting deep discounts? How does walmart do it? Volume.