GitHub lets me create public and private repos.. with a free account.. how are they making money?! Why are they throwing hardware at this explosive growth of repos with LLMs?
Users spend tokens on DeepSeek, Claude, and others -> generate variations of projects uploaded to GitHub -> Microsoft (GitHub's owner) -> trains LLMs on this -> ends up with better models.
No matter what model a user may use at any price point, microsoft can distill it.
It's distillation at a higher level
most good programmers aren't going to commit garbage solutions; they'll push it to a git remote once they see it actually solves a problem they are trying to solve, and since the git commits and their messages are also AI generated, you've good visibility into the user's intention and resulting edits to the codebase.
Users spend tokens on DeepSeek, Claude, and others -> generate variations of projects uploaded to GitHub -> Microsoft (GitHub's owner) -> trains LLMs on this -> ends up with better models.
No matter what model a user may use at any price point, microsoft can distill it.
It's distillation at a higher level
most good programmers aren't going to commit garbage solutions; they'll push it to a git remote once they see it actually solves a problem they are trying to solve, and since the git commits and their messages are also AI generated, you've good visibility into the user's intention and resulting edits to the codebase.
They want to capture it all.
Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026
https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commit... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280770)