While generative artificial intelligence has yet to make money in some areas, it has reportedly quickly proven its value in powering coding assistants.
GitHub Copilot, the Microsoft-owned AI coding assistant, has gained nearly 2 million paid subscribers since its launch in 2022, contributing to a 45% year-over-year increase in GitHub's revenue, the Financial Times reported on Friday, August 23.
“When we worked with OpenAI's first major model, GPT-3, we realized relatively quickly that they were very good at writing code and that we could build a product on top of it,” GitHub CEO Thomas Domke said in the report.
Amazon, Meta, and Google are also reportedly building AI assistants for writing and editing code.
Several startups are also competing in the space, including Replit, Anysphere, Magic, Augment, Supermaven and Poolside AI. These companies have raised $906 million since January 2023 and $433 million through 2024, the report said.
In its report, McKinsey said AI could increase software engineering productivity by 20 to 45 percent by 2023.
The report states that Coding Copilot has clear time to value and added value, and that at least one company will stop hiring people to code without AI by the end of the year. Demand for programming will increase as tasks become easier. Software engineers are already integrating these assistants into their workflows, saying that AI handles repetitive tasks and allows engineers to be more creative.
“Currently, software engineering without AI is like writing without a word processor,” Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi said in the report.
PYMNTS reported in November that using generative AI solutions to streamline software development workflows can accelerate digital transformation.
As many companies work to enhance their systems in areas such as accounts payable and receivable, the benefits of having AI-generated code on hand cannot be overstated.
“Simply put, generative AI can write the code for you,” Bob Rogers, CEO of supply chain AI company Oii.ai, told PYMNTS in an interview published in May. “Programming is a language, and generative AI doesn't mind switching from English to Spanish to Python to JavaScript; it's fluent in all of it.”
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