alt Hacker NewsGitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.
Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.
I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.
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GH being bought by MSFT way precedes their OpenAI involvement IIRC. And I don’t think it was even needed to train their models given Anthropic does fine without owning GitHub.
So this logic doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
EDIT: seems there was only a year in between them buying GH (2018) and investing in OpenAI (2019). So _maybe_ they had that foresight.
> Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.
I think this gets the timeline wrong. Microsoft acquired GH in 2018 and started the partnership with OpenAI in summer 2019.
I'm sure there was some strategy to extract value from it that wouldn't serve its users but I think OpenAI was not initially meant to be the beneficiary.